Narrative and Space

Across Short Story Landscapes

and Regional Places
Alda Correia

Peter Lang
These eight texts deal with different perspectives on the relation between
the regional short story, modernism and space. Seven of them concen-
trate on short prose (the short story and chronicle) and one deals with the
novel. Four of them consider canonical pre modernist and modernist Anglo-
American authors and the other four, Portuguese rustic and modernist
short story writers. Their common point of departure, is the notion that
the representation of the world cannot be separated from its spatial con-
text, and the effort to understand how space and landscape influenced the
structure of narratives and were represented in some of them, mainly in
short fiction. They draw attention to the importance of the underestimated
regionalist short prose narratives, essentially from a comparative literary
perspective, but also considering certain aspects of their social and cultural
connections and dissonances.

Alda Correia completed her Master’s degree in Comparative Literary Studies

in 1988, at Universidade Nova and her PhD in Comparative Literature, in
1999, at the same University; she is assistant professor at Universidade Nova
since 1999; her main research interests are comparative literature, short
fiction history and theory and narrative medicine.

www.peterlang.com
Narrative and Space
 Alda Correia

Narrative and Space

Across Short Story Landscapes
and Regional Places

Peter Lang
Bern · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien
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Contents

Introduction............................................................................................7

Part I

1. Virginia Woolf and Heidegger – Creating

and Interpreting the World.............................................................35
2. The Hybrid Genesis of the Short Story
in Washington Irving’s The Alhambra............................................53
3. Regional Narrators: Landscape in the
Short Story Cycle..........................................................................67
4. K. Mansfield’s “The Escape” – An Epiphany
on Impossibility.............................................................................83

Part II

5. Regionalism in the Portuguese Short Story.................................101

6. The City Manquée or Nostalgia for
Another Place...............................................................................121
7. Narrative Frames: Fialho de Almeida, Branquinho
da Fonseca, Mário Braga and João de Araújo Correia –
Landscape in Rural Space............................................................139
8. Worldview and Ambivalence in the Portuguese
Regionalist Short Prose Narrative...............................................163
Introduction

The eight texts that follow deal with different perspectives on the rela-
tion between the regional short story, modernism and space. Seven of
them concentrate on short prose (the short story and chronicle) and one
deals with the novel. Four of them consider canonical pre modernist
and modernist Anglo-American authors and the other four, Portuguese
rustic and modernist short story writers. Far from constituting an abso-
lutely homogeneous whole, they consider space from different angles.
What unites these texts (written in different moments), their common
point of departure, is the notion that the representation of the world
cannot be separated from its spatial context, and the effort to understand
how space and landscape influenced the structure of narratives and were
represented in some of them, mainly in short fiction. They draw atten-
tion to the importance of the underestimated regionalist short prose
narratives, essentially from a comparative literary perspective, but also
considering certain aspects of their social and cultural connections and
their dissonances.
In the interplay between space and representation, a distinction
should be made between the wider notions of “space” and “place” and
the more limited notions of “landscape” and “regionalism”, both used
as a starting point of texts 2, 3, 5, 7 and 8. De Certeau (1984: 117–118)
points out that, “space” is associated with movement (direction, veloc-
ity, time); “place” is associated with the delimitation of a field, where
elements have a definite position and location. Tuan (1977: 6) explains
that “space” is more abstract than “place” and “what begins as undif-
ferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow
it with value”. Another important distinction must be made in the con-
cept of “space” in connection with “relations of production” and “social
relations of reproduction” (Lefebvre, 1991: 32). Taking as a point of
departure a philosophical and sociological Marxist point of view, Lefe-
bvre (1991: 26) postulates that “(social) space is a (social) product” that
enhances control of thought and power; he establishes a difference that
can be applied in literary analysis to interrelate the literary field with
two other levels of experience. The conceptual triad he proposes is: 1.
spatial practices (the perceived) – it embodies an association between
daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (routes and networks,
private life and leisure); 2. representations of space (the conceived) –
conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, social engineers,
identifying what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived;
3. representational spaces (the lived) – space as directly lived through
its associated images and symbols, the space of ‘inhabitants’ but also
of artists, writers and philosophers, who describe but where the imagi-
nation seeks to change and appropriate (Ibid:38–39). Because they are
centered on representational spaces, some of the texts in the volume
endeavor to reveal the dialectical relation existing between these three
levels, particularly texts 3, 6 and 8. As Lefebvre emphasizes, the rela-
tion within the triad is dialectic and full of effects such as echoes, reper-
cussions, mirror effects. Representational space, whose only products
are symbolic works, have their source in the history of a people or indi-
viduals belonging to that people. It is an alive space, it speaks, “it has
an affective kernel or center: Ego, bedroom, dwelling, house; or square,
church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived
situations and thus immediately implies time” (Ibid: 41–42). Lefeb-
vre also highlights the uniqueness of the products of representational
spaces and the fact that they set in train aesthetic trends. The narrative
construction of the short story cycle The Country of Pointed Firs in text
3 is a good example of the dialectic between spatial practices perceived
by Orne Jewett, representations conceived by a specific narrator and a
representational space, where a symbolic work mirrors the lived history
of individuals. In the three types of landscape (idealized, decadent and
marked by oppression and rebellion) that serve as background for the
short stories in text 8, the social construction of a space is shown, that is
to say, it is shown how a certain type of society (Regeneration, Repub-
lic and Estado Novo), based on certain spatial practices (the everyday
life of rural communities), and representations of space (conceptions of
natural simplicity, conceptions of regionalism, manipulation of cultural

8
conceptions of space, popular- erudite relation) created a representa-
tional space in literature (short stories), full of ambivalence in itself. To
this representational space we could, then, call “place”.
From the point of view of literary theory, “place” may be present as
an idea through the social and intellectual experiences of the writer, and
as form, in the way the author uses them to build events, suggest themes
and define characters (Lutwack, 1984:12). The construction of “place”
is quite different in drama (where the unity of place was a very important
category for centuries) and in fiction, where it is necessary for rendering
the action, creating a setting and presenting detail, real or symbolical.
Related to “place”, the concept of “landscape”, although still referring
to a definite location, is more specific. “Landscape” refers to all that can
be seen from a certain point; it positions us as observers, at a distance
before a view to be observed. It implies “separation and observation”
(Williams, 1973: 120), a certain way of looking, artistic representation
and an effort at detachment. It initially referred to painting, as happened
with the related concept of “picturesque”, developed by William Gilpin
in his Essay on Prints (1768) and Observations on the River Wye and
several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to picturesque beauty;
made in the summer of the year 1770 (1782)1 (cf. text 2). Landscapes
are cultural representations, works of art associated with aesthetic dis-
courses. In the specific case of the short story and regionalist literature
in focus here, there are other questions to be considered as the dis-
cussion of their aesthetic value. I will refer to them shortly. The initial
meaning of “landscape” was extended by cultural geographers such as
Carl Sauer and since the 1980s by the “New Cultural Geography” group
of scholars, whose thinking and analysis developed mostly from the
Marxist economic, social and cultural perspective (cf. text 7). This new
perspective on the field may include unseen things as culture, a series
of conditions, or psychological traits. Broadly speaking, three nuanced
forms of thinking “landscape” have been contemplated as an evolution
from the ‘distance’ stance (Wylie, 2007) and are implied in the texts in
this volume.

1 On the literary development of the concept of “picturesque” see Andrews, 1994.

9
 One of them expands the relation between “landscape” and its
inhabitants or the level of integration of inhabitants and “landscape”;
it highlights the qualities of “landscape” as an environment for mean-
ingful cultural practices and values. This is, in some measure, shown
in the description of the contradiction between regionalist thematics in
Portuguese short stories and the Portuguese reading public, with the
cultural gap that existed between the peasantry and the more cultivated
social and political elite who lived in the cities and was able to manip-
ulate rural symbolism; it is also revealed in Fialho de Almeida’s posi-
tion towards the beauty of the village, always from a distant perspective
and the evidence of its ugliness, lack of charm and faults when we are
inside it (cf. text 5, p. 112). A reference for this perspective is Carl
Sauer’s “cultural landscape” (cf. text 7), W. G. Hoskins’s study of local
landscape history, emphasizing locality and rurality (Hoskins, 1955),
and J. B. Jackson’s “vernacular landscape” – landscape transformed by
individuals and common people in their everyday lives (Jackson, 1984).
Another one centers in the way of looking at “landscape”, the
‘how’ we look and its dependence on cultural values, ideologies and
expectations; it tries to understand how arts and humanities interpreted
“landscape” in the course of different historical circumstances and how
this way of knowing served the interests of one group or another; Cos-
grove (1985; 1998) and Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) (cf. texts 3 and
7) are reference authors from this perspective; in the actual volume, the
work of Washington Irving (cf. text 2) is an example of how the tradi-
tional European literary and physical “landscape” influenced the birth
of a new literary genre, the short story; and, as can be seen in text 8,
in Portugal the repressive Estado Novo used philosophical naturalism
in the interpretation of “landscape”, to deter progress and manipulate
information. In this case, it is helpful to refer to W.J.T. Mitchell’s (1994:
1–2) model, that aims to show what landscape does or how it works as
a cultural practice, an instrument of cultural power and a focus for the
formation of identity. Mitchell’s work focuses on landscape painting,
but what he writes can be applied to literary texts:
Landscape as a cultural medium thus has a double role with respect to some-
thing like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing

10
 an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable and it also makes
that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less
determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site. Thus, landscape (whether
urban or rural, artificial or natural) always greets us as space, as environment, as
that within which “we” (figured as “the figures” in the landscape) find – or lose –
ourselves. (Mitchell, 1994:2)

A third form centers on the role of landscape in the interaction culture/

nature in which both shape and are shaped; this can be explored from
the point of view of phenomenology and embodiment, as is suggested
in the first text (cf. text 1) or from the point of view of the evolution
of ancient community practices as happens in Jewett’s The Country of
Pointed Firs (cf. text 3) and, under different forms, in all the authors of
texts 7 and 8. Diverse regional landscapes are expressions of human
feedback; society and changes in the objective material world modify
nature, culture, landscape and their aesthetic representation, as is shown
in text 8 and was already referred to in connection with Lefebvre’s con-
cept of social space.
It is in the context of landscape phenomenology, that text 1 should
be understood. Although it does not deal with short stories (despite the
fact that they are mentioned because of the narrative-criticism connec-
tion in Woolf), its relation to space is built mainly through Heidegger
and secondarily through the thematization of place and space in Woolf ’s
novels. Heidegger, in “Building Dwelling Thinking” (which comple-
ments The Origin of the Work of Art referred to in text 1, concerning
space) writes:
Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man. To say that
mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their
stay among things and locales. […] Man’s relation to locales, and through locales
to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none
other than dwelling, thought essentially. (Heidegger, 1993: 359)

Space is, then, essential in human beings’ being and dwelling in the
world, and the writing of a novel contributes to the same end. As Hillis
Miller argues, in a long and quite critical chapter on Heidegger, the writ-
ing of a novel and its reading, play a part in the activities of building,

11
dwelling and thinking, helping in the construction of landscapes, which
they apparently presuppose as already finished (Miller, 1995: 16). This
means, in Virginia Woolf, that with her novels she builds a mental
mapping, a space of consciousness, a human topography where spaces
become inter-corporeal, where, departing from physical spaces (in To
the Lighthouse, the summer home and the lighthouse of the Isle of Skye
in Scotland) she leads the characters, through dwelling and thinking, to
interrogate existence. Besides, for Woolf as a writer, this construction
was also an answer to illness.
Moreover, Virginia Woolf gives evidence of the important role of
space in the modernist, changing world she endorsed; in 1905 she wrote
in TLS the review “Literary Geography”, warning the reader about the
disillusionment caused if he or she tried to recover the authors’ spirit
in the places they had lived in or visited, and stressing that “a writer’s
country is a territory within his own brain” (Woolf, 1986: 35). She wrote
many other essays on London streets, monuments, houses, squares, and
other places, where she used to stroll around, to explore and to escape,
letting her imagination flow and create an interrelation between the real
and the imagined (see Woolf, 2006; Squier, 1985; Wilson, 1987), as she
explains in the famous “Street Haunting: a London Adventure” (Woolf,
1970). Place is an essential element in the writer’s novels. In Mrs. Dal-
loway, it is from the topography of the city (and the hours struck by
Big Ben) that the characters constantly start to explore their thoughts,
remembrances and anxieties, their interior territory, as can be seen in
the short story referred to in text 6, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”
(1923), which was probably conceived as the first chapter of the novel.
In The Waves (cf. text 1) Woolf intersects, in parallel, the complexity of
inner spaces and outer natural spaces, and in Between the Acts (cf. text
1) the spaces of the play and real life/narrative are constantly colliding,
being built and destroyed. Beyond this perspective, but also embedded
in all her writing, is the conflict between the conservative, traditionally
female private space and the habitually male public space, a gendered
conflictual space ideally overcome in art through the “androgynous
artist” theory (see Thacker, 2003; Snaith/Whitworth, 2007).

12
 Resuming the initial distinctions between “space”, “place”, “land-
scape” and “regionalism”, I would say that, as referred to in text 7
(p. 141), the concept of region is defined as a homogeneous area with
physical and cultural characteristics, distinct from neighboring or sur-
rounding areas, but this is also a definition of the mind. Beyond the
character of landscapes, their continuity and the culture and identity
of their peoples also differentiate and define regions. In literature, (lit-
erary) regionalism designates a narrative subgenre that has developed,
more consistently from the mid- nineteenth century onwards and has
been aesthetically undervalued by literary historians and critics. A
distinction should be made between “regional” and “regionalist”.
“Regional” refers to the topographic location, the geographic situation
of the narrative; “regionalist” implies a literary or cultural intention of
defending and valuing a certain social or cultural perspective, a par-
ticular view of a culture, often from the perspective of marginalized
persons. Snell (1998: 1), for example, writing about Britain and Ire-
land, and being a little ambiguous in the second part of the quotation,
defines “regional” as
fiction that is set in a recognizable region, and which describes features distin-
guishing the life, social relations, customs, language, dialect or other aspects of
the culture of that area and its people. […] In such writing, a particular place or
regional culture may perhaps be used to illustrate an aspect of life in general, or
the effects of a particular environment upon the people living in it.

Marjorie Pryse (1994: 48–50), writing about “regionalism” in American

literature, characterizes it as an approach that represents the lives of
women, older persons, impoverished groups or marginalized people that
deviate from the traditional perspective; it leads readers to consider the
“peculiar”, promoting a different reading of ‘difference’; it also shows
the way the dominant culture creates and maintains hierarchies in the
name of region. The difficulties of reading regionalist texts have to do
with cross-cultural interaction, with the reader’s own expectations, the
parameters within which he or she has been taught to read and his or her
ability to get into the text worldview; part of the difficulty, then, is situ-
ated outside the text (cf. Lefebvre). In this volume, regionalist features

13
are noticeable, in different aspects of texts 8 (ambivalence between real-
ity and its representation, between the facts and their interpretation by
readers) and 3 (uncommonness of the communities of The Country of
Pointed Firs and Winesburg, Ohio). Yet, “regional” and “regionalist” are
not always separable designations. In many short stories, both features
are present and the reader’s role is fundamental as Umberto Eco clearly
explained. The concept “regionalism” is used in texts 5 and 8. In both, it
refers to regional texts; some of them have regionalist intentions, others
do not. A different perspective is Aquilino Ribeiro’s view of regionalism
(cf. text 8): he considers that we should not speak of “regionalism” in
Portugal because there are no linguistic differences that justify this posi-
tion in such a small country; besides, this literature demands deperson-
alization of the author and simplicity of themes and this does not make
for good art.
The question of aesthetic value in regionalist texts has also been
a subject of debate (cf. text 5 and text 8, pages 205-206). One of the
points in question is the intention or purpose of the text: what is the
relation between fact and fiction? Should the text be a faithful docu-
ment, as T. Hardy defended? How can one differentiate it aesthetically
from naturalism? How, being nostalgic, can it be innovative? Is it mer-
itorious to represent regional characters and regional life as objects to
be viewed from the perspective of the non-regional outsider, for enter-
tainment purposes, as happens in “local-color” fiction? An enlightening
discussion of these and other themes and a reconsideration of the new
possibilities of the field are developed in David Jordan’s Regionalism
Reconsidered (Jordan, 1994).
Another distinction to be made here bears upon the relation between
the short story genre, on which the majority of the texts of this volume
concentrate, and regional and landscape literature. It is accepted by
most short fiction critics that the short story genre developed through-
out the nineteenth century, from different sources (humorous and char-
acter sketches, allegorical tales, oriental tales inspired by The Thousand
and One Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, among others), became a rec-
ognized artistic literary genre in modernism (May, 1995; 2013; Head,
1992; Reid, 1991; March-Russel, 2009; Goyet, 2014; Winther, 2004)

14
and developed as one of the most notable literary manifestations of the
twentieth century, as happens, for example, with the Latin-American
short story. One of its most influential sources are traditional and popu-
lar tales and narratives, originating in oral tradition, in myths, legends,
yarns, parables, fables, exemplum and other “simple forms” (Jolles,
1972), materialized for the first time by the Grimm Brothers in 1812
with Kinder und Hausmärchen. These narratives and other similar col-
lections inspired various authors of the first half of the century who,
still under the influence of the Romantic fascination for medieval tales
and ballads, under the attraction for the “fantastic” and the “marve-
lous” (Todorov, 1970) published in non-literary periodicals, creating in
their stories a mixture of marvelous nuances, romantic and realist fea-
tures. E. T. A. Hoffmann published Das Goldene Topf (1814/9) as the
third volume of the anthology Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot.
Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (1842) was published in the author’s Collected
Works; Hawthorne published “Young Goodman Brown” anonymously
in The New-England Magazine (1835); Washington Irving published
“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in The Sketch
Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1919–20), issued serially in the USA
and published later in book form, in Britain. He integrated a European
traditional, cultural space (England, Germany, France, Spain) and an
emergent American space, showing that landscape and place, both real
and cultural places were essential for him, personally and as a writer
(cf. text 2).
Charles May considers the short story “the structural core of all
fiction in its derivation from folktale and myth” (May, 1989: 64). He
points out that the short story is the “most primal narrative impulse”,
being short because of the type of reality and “mode of knowing” it
incorporates – the primacy of one experience. “The field of research
for the short story is the primitive, antisocial world of the unconscious,
and the materials of its analysis are not manners but dreams”. That is
why the short story is mythic and spiritual, intuitive and lyrical, arising
from the encounter of humans with the sacred or the absurd (May, 1984:
327–330). This connection is present in regional fiction and also in

15
modernist fiction, which reconciles the mythic and the aesthetic modal-
ity. As Warren Walker writes:
The short story and the folk tale derive from a common root and retain many of
the same qualities. They are often pointed toward the same goals, and they echo
each other in mode, motif and myth. In brief, despite its evolution in new and
strange and sometimes exciting directions, the modern short story remains in the
same genus with the tale of tradition. (Walker, 1982: 24)

In Britain, the most important magazine publishing short narrative texts

during the nineteenth century was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
(1817–1980). The texts included travel narratives, very popular at the
time (cf. text 2), sketches presenting brief episodes of the characters’
lives, morality tales, adventure stories and terror tales. Their popularity
was so wide that in the second half of the century three series of selec-
tions of Tales from Blackwood (30 volumes) were reprinted (Harris,
1979: 29). According to Harris, “two groups of tales stood out early in
the century […] giving an immediate readership: the edifying or instruc-
tive tale inculcating religious, moral or even economic principles; and
the regional tale describing the life and manners of a particular people”
(Harris, 1979: 31). The regional tale was, therefore, a popular type of
short fiction, easier to read than historical novels, capable of evoking
history and national identity, enabling writers to challenge hegemonic
ideas of nationhood and progress, which remained widely present in the
Anglo-American short story tradition. These narratives were a mixture
of superstitions, traditions, historical legends, supernatural tales, events
of rural life, memories, real and imagined stories, conventional and
sentimental episodes and portrayed the local life, the identity and the
peculiarities of smaller provincial and wider regions such as Scotland,
Wales or Ireland (particularly well represented). In some Dublin Mag-
azines and Journals, the editors maintained a clear distinction between
the collected legend and the created tale (Harris, 1979: 44), which evi-
dences the tendency to maturity of the genre. Beyond their popularity,
these volumes of Tales easily associated with the discussion of local and
national identities, mainly in Scotland and Ireland; however, the titles
of the anthologies feature individual, “patriotic” and “supernatural”

16
perspectives: Tales of My Neighbourhood (Gerald Griffin, 1835); Tales
of Irish Life (Michael Whitty, 1824); Fairy Legends and Traditions of
the South of Ireland (Thomas Croker, 1825–8) (see Killick, 2008; Snell,
1998 and 2002). The British regional short story, through its relation
with folklore played a part in the development of the modernist short
story.
Washington Irving (cf. text 2) played a central role in the devel-
opment of the short story, of the Anglo-American short story (on the
influence of Irving on British short fiction see Killick, 2008: 70–71)
and in the creation of a literary cultural space in New York. Space is
quite important, as noted earlier, in his literary career. Irving lived 17
years abroad (1815–1832), was eager to absorb new cultures and used
his voyages and travels to collect literary material. Five of these years
were spent in Britain, where he visited and made friends with Walter
Scott, whom he much admired. He valued the role that folk culture
played in Scott’s work and, like him, believed in the centrality of legend
for national and local identity. In his short prose based on folktales,
travel narratives and descriptive sketches, Irving mingles the European
cultural, Romantic tradition, influenced by British folklore and German
Volkssage (he read the German folk tales widely, and knew Hoffmann’s
writings) with new concepts of national American identity. The tale,
reminiscent of oral tradition and local legend was adequate to create an
ancestry, a myth and a literature for the new American space. Irving’s
three collections of short narrative fiction and sketches, published while
living in Britain (The Sketch Book-1819–20, Bracebridge Hall-1822
and Tales of a Traveller-1824) conquered popular and critical recogni-
tion, contributing to the acceptance of the genre and to the enlargement
of its traditional boundaries (see Killick, 2008). His ability to combine
pathos, humor and wit, variety and brevity in short pieces that were not
necessarily concerned with moral effect, as evidenced in Tales of the
Alhambra, was decisive for this result. One of the defining elements
present in the history of the genre consolidation, widely used by Irving
in his short story volumes, is framing.
Framing is an essential device in storytelling; it occurs in The Thou-
sand and One Nights, in Boccaccio’s Decameron, in the Canterbury

17
Tales, in Apuleio’s The Golden Ass and other classic works. It corre-
sponded to the telling of a sequence of (adventure) stories and with time
the storyteller becomes a more sophisticated narrator, pair of narrators
or authority figure, introduced at different narrative levels. The story
frame may: give the readers (listeners) a rational explanation for the
tale, if supernatural details are present; connect the reader with oral
traditions; establish a critical distanced mediator as happens in The
Country of Pointed Firs or Winesburg Ohio (cf. text 3); subvert or give
credence. Irving used this strategy in the books of stories already men-
tioned, and also in Tales of the Alhambra that is structurally situated
between a travel memoir and a short story cycle. The figure of the sto-
ryteller, whose purity, experience and wisdom are praised by Walter
Benjamin (Benjamin, 2006; 1936) in his famous text “The Storyteller”,
corresponds largely to the narrator’s profile in Tales of the Alhambra.
It is, no doubt, an essential element in the construction of regional and
regionalist short stories, as also shown in texts 2, 3 and 8. Summing
up, short story writing, space and landscape were, in Irving, intimately
linked. He grasped the potential of short fiction, its flexibility, its power
to take advantage of narrative frames, brevity, the collecting of legend
fragments and unusual episodes. He joined all this with his interest for
different places, landscapes and cultures and, in Tales of the Alhambra,
with the exploration of the mythic universe of a very specific physical
and cultural space.
Like Irving, the authors of regional stories quickly realized the
potential of short fiction. By the mid-nineteenth century, the life changes
provoked by the Industrial Revolution and the debate on the good and
bad consequences of progress gave regional fiction the possibility to
call for an idyllic lost world, showing all its possible nuances. This is
shown in The Country of Pointed Firs (cf. text 3) and in some of the
Portuguese stories of text 8. Together with the involvement of regional
fiction in the development of the modernist short story, other important,
non-literary factors facilitated its success in Britain: a broadening of
the educational base (Elementary Education Act of 1870), that origi-
nated an increase in the reading public; the mechanization of printing
(printing on rotary principles) and the development of mass-circulation

18
periodicals specializing in fiction (Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–1907),
Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975), Temple Bar Magazine (1860–1906),
Longman’s Magazine (1882–91), The Strand Magazine (1890-) [see
Orel, 1989]). Short fiction was selling and assumed many different pro-
files from the plot story to the literary modernist short story. The new
genre defined by brevity and concentration in fragmentation, subjectiv-
ism, apprehension and description of an isolated and definite moment
can be seen as the literary correlative of a different worldview. Frequently
contrasted with the novel (associated with time), the short story sense of
temporality resonates against the short story spatial base, and readers
move in time from beginning to the end and back again (Rohrberger,
2004:7). This compression of time and space is often given through
epiphany, a technique that reflects time-space condensation, a freezing
of the flux of time in a specific space, similar to Wordsworth’s “spots of
time” in the “Prelude”. Some short fiction theorists, like Clare Hanson,
even defend that epiphany is the structural core of modernist short fic-
tion, as it emphasizes a unique moment of significant or intense experi-
ence that the short story form adequately conveys (Hanson, 1985: 55).
The epiphanic moment is a break in time continuity, a revelation that
has much of the intuitive or absurd, a halt that is materialized in a space.
Short story brevity is suitable to explore this spatial form structure as
happens in text 4. Here, the place, the tree that the protagonist sees cas-
ually through a garden gate, is not separated from his consciousness of
it (“he was conscious of its presence just inside the garden gate” (“The
Escape”, par. 28). Reality is also emotional reality, and space is formed
in the relation this specific place has, in the character’s experience, with
other places presented before. Time builds the relation between them.
The attempt to fuse the inner ego and the outer world, as also happened
in text 1, is characteristic of an impressionist and modernist aesthet-
ics, affected as well by the social and material changes felt during the
second half of the nineteenth century, by all the dynamics of modern
life and the new concern with topography and geography. Space is, thus,
implied in short fiction theory and narratology through the suitability of
the use of spatial form in a brief narrative.

19
 Reflection on space in literary theory began with Joseph Frank’s
1945 essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (Frank, 1991), Bakh-
tin’s concept of chronotope (1981) and Mitchell’s essay on spatial form
(Mitchell, 1980). Kern (1983), Soja (1989), Harvey (1990), Warf (2008),
Jameson (1981; 1991) and Cosgrove (1984/1998) explain from a Marx-
ist and cultural perspective how the time-space relation developed with
modernism and postmodernism and how industrial, economic, political
and cultural changes determined different life dimensions and percep-
tions. The machine revolution, the development of factories, urbaniza-
tion and means of communication (telegraph, telephone), the new sys-
tems of transport such as the railway, the rise of the markets and mass
production, all transformed the perception human beings had of space.
Modernist literature created metaphorical spaces that tried to make
sense of the material spaces of modernity (Thacker, 2003:3) and show
how people live and experience these new spaces in cities or country
landscapes. An echo of the new perception of space is, for example,
Apollinaire’s poem “Lettre-Océan” (1914), where space and the dynam-
ics of modern life are suggested through the topographical disposition
of the elements, depicting a world connected by sound in space. One
of these is the Eiffel Tower, also painted by Delaunay in 1910–11. All
the changes in the sense of time and space in economic, political and
cultural life brought an awareness of complexity, fragmentation, rela-
tivism and perspectivism, that was transmitted to art. Technologic and
scientific progress both isolated and brought together people and com-
munities, both unified and fragmented space, brought both communica-
tion and competition, established both homogeneity and local identity
awareness (see also Oakes, 1997; Brooker/Thacker, 2005). This also
brought the reappraisal of literary regionalism. As Harvey writes:
Modernism, seen as a whole, explored the dialectic of place versus space, of
present versus past, in a variety of ways. While celebrating universality and the
collapse of spatial barriers, it also explored new meanings for space and place in
ways that tacitly reinforced local identity.
[…] It would be wrong to consider these two wings of thought – the universalism
and the particularism – as separate from each other. They should be regarded,
rather, as two currents of sensibility that flowed along side by side, often within
the same person […] While modernism always ostensibly asserted the values of

20
 internationalism and universalism, it could never properly settle its account with
parochialism and nationalism […] But unless we are prepared to see, even its
universal aspirations as the outcome of a perpetual dialogue with localism and
nationalism, I think we shall miss some of its more important features. (Harvey,
1990: 273–276)

The cycles of stories The Country of Pointed Firs and Winesburg, Ohio
(cf. text 3) are situated in this context. Both narratives unite a modernist
construction with the regional community perspective – a community
surrounded by a distant and progressive city. Orne Jewett’s narrative
does not deal with standard modernism and can be seen as an alterna-
tive modernism (Brooker/Thacker, 2005) where the use of the regional
sketch is explored by a woman writer (see Fetterley/Pryse, 2003). In
these decades (1890–1920) modernism was still converging on big
cities, which were bordered by traditional country life; the world was
not fully modernized and old and new knocked against each other, pro-
ducing an eruption of creativity (Brooker/Thacker, 2005: 7).
Loriggio’s theoretical reflection on the evolution of the field indi-
cates this conflicting progress. Ambivalence, he states, has always been
present in the history of regionalism – cultural hybridism, world real-
ities versus characters’ behavior, geography as dialectic between what
there is and what people imagine (Loriggio, 1994). Secular regional-
ism “emerged, in fiction in significant coincidence with a number of
other fundamental developments: the rise of the modern nation-state
and nationalism, the idea of national literature, realism and the consol-
idation of European imperialist expansionism”. Realist novelists with
their frescoes disclose unnamed “semantic fields” and also the “artifi-
cial cultural nature of the homogeneity the state promoted” (Loriggio,
1994: 17–18). This dialectic between globalization and localism deep-
ened in the twentieth century with technology, massification of behav-
ior and loss of identity. According to this critic, North America’s most
significant contribution to the dossier on regionalism is the envisaging
of nation through the region, attachment to place as a fully positive
trait; Europe cannot be regionalized without stepping out of its skin. In
Africa, regionalism’s duality in the context of postcolonialism shows
it: “in writing about Nigeria, Chinua Achebe detaches it from empire,

21
regionalizes it; in writing in English he rejoins his country’s sovereig-
nity to the residues of the empire” (Loriggio, 1994:20–21). These antin-
omies and their relation to identity questions and space integrate region-
alism in modernity and postmodernity. Its complex and heterogeneous
connection to present thought implies more and more the recognition of
cultural mobility (Greenblatt, 2009; Berensmeyer/Ehland 2013).
The collision between the rural world and modernization, as
referred to in the penultimate paragraph, also happened in Portugal on
a much deeper scale, as the country was dozens of years behind other
European countries in the process of industrialization. The four texts of
Part 2 center on Portuguese short fiction. Portugal, more influenced by
French culture (on French regionalism see Thiesse, 1991) in the second
half of the nineteenth century, developed the same relation between tra-
dition, oral storytelling, folklore and supernatural tales, as mentioned
before. But here, the evolution to the modernist aesthetic short story did
not occur as in Britain (Joyce, Mansfield, Henry James, R. Kipling) or
France (Guy de Maupassant, André Gide). The longevity of the regional
or rustic short story, focusing on rustic spaces was significant, and this
subgenre had a continuous presence in Portuguese literature from the
mid-nineteenth century (Alexandre Herculano, Rebelo da Silva, Pereira
da Cunha, Júlio Dinis, Trindade Coelho), through realism and natural-
ism (Abel Botelho, Teixeira de Queirós, Aquilino Ribeiro, Fialho de
Almeida, Alberto Braga), in 1940s neo realism (Miguel Torga, Manuel
da Fonseca, Alves Redol) and still after this period with João de Araújo
Correia or the vast work of Domingos Monteiro. The early modern-
ist literary short story written by Almada Negreiros (cf. text 6), Bran-
quinho da Fonseca (cf. text 7) or Raúl Brandão is, in comparison, much
less cultivated. The literary representational level possibly reflected,
in complex ways, spatial practices and the social structure and condi-
tions of the country. Regionalism in Portugal was not, as happened in
France, a movement of strong apology for provincial literature, culture
and language (see Charles-Brun, 1911 and Thiesse, 1991); in Portu-
gal the longing for development was strongly felt by intellectuals, and
very few (cf. text 8) defended a regionalist generalized movement; the
regional short story was used with more limited intentions: recovering

22
the storytelling tradition, giving a moral example through a sketch,
writing a chronicle or travel memoir, reproducing an ideology or cer-
tain cultural values, showing inequalities or inadequate life conditions.
The most important studies on Portuguese short story are: the volumes
of Ana Maria L. da Costa – O Conto Regional na Imprensa Periódica
de 1875 a 1930 (Costa, 1990); Massaud Moisés’s anthology O Conto
Português – (Moisés, 1975); the recent work produced in Centro de
Línguas e Culturas at Aveiro University, through its periodical Forma
Breve (Ferreira 2003–15), with numbers dedicated to diverse aspects of
the short story and its tributary forms; three anthologies with critical
analysis of the stories coordinated by Rocheta & Neves (2010; 2012)
and Rocheta & Martins (2011). Important chapters in reference books
are: “Regionalistas e Panfletários” – Óscar Lopes (2002), which brings
up and frames in its contexts many regional narrative texts, geographi-
cally organized. He devotes a final subchapter to memoir chronicle and
pamphletarian texts, opening to the study of social and identity ques-
tions. José C. Seabra Pereira in “Rumos de Narrativa Breve Pré-Mod-
ernista” (2004a) describes the influence of decadence, symbolism and
neo-Romanticism on the Portuguese short story, but he touches very
briefly on the “rustic-traditionalist regeneration”; in chapters 5 and 6 of
História Crítica da Literatura Portuguesa/7 (2004 b), Pereira develops
the same question applied to narrative and includes important theoreti-
cal texts of the period, but does not centre exclusively on regionalism or
short narrative prose. Chapter 2.4 of Erik Van Achter’s 2010 PhD dis-
sertation “On the Nature of the [Portuguese] Short Story: A Poetics of
Intimacy” is devoted to the rural short story (conto rústico) and mainly
analyses the realist, naturalist and decadent affiliations of the authors.
The connection between regionalist literature and the questions of com-
munity identities is one of the aims of Luís Trindade’s study on the con-
struction of a symbolic basis for Salazarism (2008) through literature
and national culture; this work is an important frame to situate many
regional authors. Some anthologies on specific periods have recently
appeared; among them M. Saraiva de Jesus’ Antologia do Conto Real-
ista e Naturalista (2000) includes an introduction about the period.

23
 The texts in Part 2 of this volume (texts 5, 6, 7 and 8) start with the
belief that the writers of Portuguese regional short fiction were affected
by the spatial and social practices of their country and by the contra-
dictions and lack of progress typical of the Portuguese nineteenth/
twentieth centuries, and this delayed and blocked the development of
the early modernist short story. Text 5 considers the development and
importance of the regionalist short story in Portugal and reflects on the
present reassessment of regionalism as a field of study. Text 6 deals
with the representation of the city in some Portuguese short prose texts
(Eça de Queiroz, Fialho de Almeida, Irene Lisboa, Almada Negreiros)
and briefly contrasts it with the modernist city represented in the short
stories of Joyce and Woolf. Text 7 assumes that the regional narrative
frame reveals some of the aesthetic, social and cultural characteris-
tics of the Portuguese space. It focuses on four important authors of
regional short narrative prose from distinct periods, showing their dif-
ferent placings in landscape. Text 8 deals with the conviction that the
relation between regionalism and ideology inspired by the concept of
nationalism – in the broad sense of national identity – is a social and
literary fact, common to several European countries, though developing
from different axes and different forms. In Portugal, Liberal ideology,
Republicanism and the Estado Novo [New State] interfered in this rela-
tion, using, transforming and finally, fighting it. This created paradoxes,
ambivalences and routes that are revealed through an analysis of the
cultural representation of landscape and its description, through the
study of the symbolism of elements, characters and point of view in
a selected group of authors. The agility of short prose is essential here
and should be stressed. In Portugal, as in other countries, under differ-
ent forms, short fiction and in this case regional short fiction, linked to
the traditional tale and to the travel sketch, thriving with the help of the
press, adopted by marginal or celebrated writers, faced as a consumable
or a literary piece of writing, always corresponds to a short and intense
beam of light concentrated on a limited space.

24
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31
Part I
1. Virginia Woolf and Heidegger – Creating
and Interpreting the World

The search for philosophical influence on Virginia Woolf ’s work has

centred on phenomenology. Jean Guiguet’s Virginia Woolf and her Works
(1962), a Sartrean reading of some works of the author, launched a series
of studies as Howard Harper’s Between Language and Silence (1982),
which tries to identify Woolf’s “creative consciousness” as expressed in
her writing, and Harvena Richter’s Virginia Woolf – The Inward Voyage
(1970), which moves into the area of philosophical psychology, discuss-
ing perception and feeling. Another group of studies analyses repetition
or recurrence, her construction of meaning or the presentation of time,
as Ricoeur’s Temps et Récit (1983–85). Mark Hussey’s The Singing of
the Real World considers the philosophy of her writing from the point of
view of the experience of the world and “inner space” (Hussey, 1986).
Recently, the echo of Heidegger in Woolf has been studied in more
detail: Wakefield’s “Mrs. Dalloway existential temporality” (Wakefield,
2013) argues that the depiction of time in Woolf is Heideggerian rather
than Bergsonian; Emma Simone’s “Virginia Woolf – Sensations, Moods
and the Everyday” (Simone, 2009) relates Heidegger’s concept of Angst
with the revelation of essential aspects of being, in Woolf’s characters;
Nussbaum in “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in V. Woolf ’s
To the Lighthouse (1995) defends that the approach (by Woolf) of the
problem of other minds is made not only by overt statements inside
the text, but also by the form of the text itself, in its manner of depict-
ing both sealed life and communication (Nussbaum, 1995); Judy Reese
(Reese, 1996) relates Woolf’s techniques of disruption with some of
Heidegger’s conceptions.
A. O. Frank’s (2001) essay entitled The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf
analyses the affinities between the thought structures of Virginia Woolf
and the ontologies and existential conclusions of authors like Nietzsche,
Heiddeger, Gadamer, Derrida and Wittgenstein. The aim, Frank says,
“is to place Woolf’s thought into that context of ideas with which it
seems involuntarily to communicate” (Frank, 2001: 17). Considering
more specifically two works and the concept of what is to be human in
the daily experience, Heidi Storl (2008) claims that the modern under-
standing of human being and doing, served as a focal point for both Hei-
degger’s Being and Time (1927) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).
Jorge Sacido Romero1 argues that for Woolf and Heidegger beings do
not exist outside the mind or independently of Dasein. For him “Woolf ’s
artistic project may be understood in terms of Heideggerian “freedom”.
Beings open themselves to Dasein and truth is an effect of this opening,
actually, it is the relatedness taking place between beings and Dasein
in this region of the work of art”. Laure Doyle develops the question of
inter corporeal relations between bodies and things in To the Lighthouse
and Elizabeth Kimball’s argument follows an opposite direction. She
questions Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art, his method and the
validity of his theory in the case of the literary arts, using Mrs. Dallo-
way as case study. But I will not consider Kimball’s thesis.
In this paper I will hypothesize that V. Woolf ’s way of under-
standing and interpreting the world resembles Heidegger’s concepts of
Dasein and the birth of the work of art. Some aspects of To the Light-
house (1927), The Waves (1931) and Between the Acts (1941) will be
analysed in relation to these conceptions, trying to show that there is a
continuity but also a tendency to chaos and incommunicability in the
work of art, developing from the modernist picture of Lily Briscoe to
the book of Bernard and the “post modern” pageant of Miss la Trobe.
This ontological and phenomenological proposal helps to situate Woolf
in relation to the postmodern nuances of her work, other than looking
at it only from the point of view of modernist consciousness problems.
Woolf’s approach to subject, object and the nature of reality can
be interpreted in the light of Heidegger’s “hermeneutical phenome-
nology”. The philosopher describes his project as a “hermeneutic of
being” (Heidegger, 1993: 58–63) and this includes language and art.
Understanding is not a particular act one performs but part of the very

1 Jorge Sacido Romero, “Truth in Woolf and Heidegger”, Unpublished.

36
structure of human existence. Literary interpretation, for him, is not
something we do but something the reader must let happen, by allowing
himself to be interrogated by the text. These points of view are pres-
ent both in Woolf’s fiction and in her criticism. According to Thomas
M. McLaughlin, Woolf’s criticism is usually focused on her response
to a particular work rather than on a theoretical account of the proce-
dures and beliefs that generate the readings; it often concentrates on
the responses of the critic, on the commentary of these operations, on
how the reader can discern the human soul in a text, on questioning the
nature of interpretation, in one word, on the effort of knowing. This con-
cern with interpretation is shared by her fiction as McLaughlin points
out:
Woolf ’s critical interpretation is fundamentally a fictional act and her fictions
enact the process of interpretation. That is, the fundamental narrative event in
her fiction is often an attempt to move from a character’s behaviour to his hidden
essence […] Characters […] are caught up in their own mental worlds, and recog-
nize that others are equally isolated. (McLaughlin, 1981:177)

In this context, the process of interpretation is crucial for survival:

for example, in Orlando, a Biography, Orlando tries to interpret his/
her multiple selves to find his/her real identity; in the short story “An
Unwritten Novel” it is the constant interpretation of the writer looking
at the real character, that sustains the narrative. Essays like “Mr. Ben-
nett and Mrs. Brown”, “Reading” (Woolf, 1981; 1995) or “Professions
for Women” (Woolf, 1970) are, in their selectivity and narration, very
similar to pieces of short fiction. This close relationship between fic-
tion and criticism is also emphasized by Dominic Head (1992) when he
states that there is sometimes no clear distinction between her fictional
work and her essays, and that two of her most important essays are
directly linked with her short stories: “An Unwritten Novel”, “Moments
of Being” and “The Lady in the Looking Glass” are the illustration of
the principles of  “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Kew Gardens”,
“A Haunted House” and “Blue and Green” (Woolf, 1991) are linked
with the “Modern Fiction” essay. In this one she writes: “If honestly
examined life presents question after question which must be left to

37
sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills
us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair” (Woolf,
1994.4a: 163). And in “How should one read a book?” (Woolf, 1986:
259) about interpretation: “But if you open your mind as widely as pos-
sible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the
twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of
a human being unlike any other”.
In the memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (Woolf, 1982: 134), when
describing the family walks in St Ives, the colours of the trees and the
changes of light, V. Woolf shows her conception of response to things,
subjectivity and its connection to art:
While I am writing this the light changes; an apple becomes a vivid green.
I respond – how? And then the little owl [makes] a chattering noise. Another
response. St. Ives to cut short an obscure train of thought, about the other voice
or voices and their connection with art, with religion: figuratively, I could snap-
shot what I mean by fancying myself afloat, [in an element] which is all the time
responding to things we have no words for – exposed to some invisible ray […].

The whole memoir is, in fact, a detailed analysis of her memories of

the real world in which she explains and reflects on the impact of past
experience on her subjectivity and in the consequences of this for her
writing. She acknowledges the changes and continuities of individual
identity, revealing how all this defined her self and after all, her reality
(“the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they hap-
pened” –Woolf, 1982: 75).
The desire for interpretation, the interrogation of existence, is care-
fully integrated in the themes and techniques of some, if not all, of
Woolf’s novels. To the Lighthouse is a good example. The relation of
personality to death and time, and of the individual to the sum of expe-
rience in general, are two central themes. They are treated in a variety
of ways, by presenting different thought patterns in different charac-
ters. All the characters are engaged in a process of understanding the
outer, the other’s world and all have difficulties in assimilating their
own perspective with those points of view: while she is putting away
her brushes, scraping her palette of the mounds, Lily tries to understand

38
Mrs. Ramsay’s world and priorities in the light of her own, of the thought
that an unmarried woman misses the best of life; beyond all the reasons
she liked it:
There was her father; her home; even, had she dared to say it, her painting. But
all this seemed so little, so virginal, against the other. Yet, as the night wore
on, and white lights parted the curtains […] gathering a desperate courage she
would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked
to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that. (Woolf, 1992:
44–45).

The narrator’s merging with the perspectives of the characters rein-

forces the authority of each character and underlines their individual
processes of understanding. The lighthouse and the journey to get there
are presented from different points of view and mean different things
according to the aims of each, that is, each sees in it the possible uses or
ends which make sense to himself. Reality is for Woolf the shaky sum
of all these meanings and it is this whole she tries to give in the work.
The experience of reality is also conditioned by time and the existence
of death. This is brought up in the second and third parts (‘Time Passes’
and ‘The Lighthouse’), where we can see that the previous deaths and
the passing of time affected the essence of the characters’ project and
their attitude to existence. Friedman (1991) interprets the symbolism of
the lighthouse as a search for balance between the image of expansion
and release associated with objectivity and the image of concentration
associated with subjectivity. This final intuition of the essential truth of
the nature of reality is achieved by Mrs. Ramsay.
One of the most important theoretical nuclei of Heidegger’s work
is the circular structure of understanding: the world is only given to us
as we have, before all specific experience, a certain cluster of ideas,
pre-judgements, which guide us in the discovery of things. The mean-
ings of things are but their possible uses to our ends. Because man is a
possibility of being, all the structures of his existence are characterized
by opening and possibility. Dasein exists in the world as a project (Hei-
degger, 1993: 183–186). Woolf ‘s concept of fact and vision seems to
be very close to this. The facts (objective data) are given – the trip to

39
the lighthouse, the stocking, Lily’s painting, Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner –
but above all, they are used to show what Heidegger calls the being of
Man as a being in the world. Each of the facts is assumed differently by
characters and it is this being in the world that defines Man. Lily sums
up the idea in Part III:
And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which
traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was
apt to particularize itself at such moments as these, […] What is the meaning of
life? That was all – a simple question; […] The great revelation had never come.
The great revelation perhaps never did come. (Woolf, 1992: 138)

This type of question asked by all the characters shows the existence
of an internal quest, a search for meaning implied in the title of the
book and initiated in the opening scene. One of Heidegger’s existen-
tials (Heidegger, 1993: 33 and 70) which has been translated as state
of mind (Befindlichkeit) draws attention to the fact that the existence
of man in his relation to the world includes not only understanding and
interpretation but also a certain emotional tone or value. In fact, this
is the original and primary global grasping of the world (Heidegger,
1993: 172–173). In To the Lighthouse the value given to the feminine
perspective associated with emotion (Lily can be seen as the heiress of
Mrs. Ramsay) and the questioning of Mr. Ramsay’s rationality (which
eventually dissolves a little with the final journey), can be interpreted
as a way of making manifest the characters’ Being and how they are.
Sections six and eighteen of chapter one, are two of the many examples
of contrast between the attitudes of the two members of the couple:
Mr. Ramsay was “a splendid mind,” “like the keyboard of a piano,
divided into so many notes or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six
letters all in order”; his splendid mind ran over those letters one by
one, firmly and accurately. Mrs Ramsay “felt inclined just for a moment
[…] to pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach
it; separate it off; clean it off of all the emotions and odds and ends of
things, and so hold it before her […] and she felt […] that community
of feeling with other people which emotion gives” (Woolf, 1992: 31;
95–96).

40
 If knowledge of things is rooted in the articulation between an orig-
inal understanding of things and being in the world, part of this under-
standing comes from participation in an historical and social world, in
its tendencies and in its common way of seeing and judging things.
Because the being in the world lives with others, he tends to under-
stand it according to what one thinks. This lack of authenticity can only
be overcome by establishing a direct relationship with things, taking
hold of them, including them in the being’s own existence projection,
understanding as projection (Heidegger, 1993: 148–163 and 182–185).
Heidegger says that “inauthenticity does not mean anything like Being-
no-longer in the world, but amounts rather to a quite distinctive kind
of Being- in- the- world – the kind which is completely fascinated by
the “world” and by the Dasein-with of Others in the “they” (Heidegger:
1993: 220). The attempt to get to the understanding of things in them-
selves, articulated with the participation in a social group, may corre-
spond, in the novel, to Lily’s progress, through conversation, discoveries
and painting:
The colour, the shape, the brush in her hand, the passage from conception to work:
It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons
set on her, […] and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any
down a dark passage for a child. But what she wished to get hold of was that very
jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and
start afresh […]. (Woolf, 1992: 20 and 164)

The third part of the novel is haunted by death. Mrs. Ramsay’s presence
is constantly evoked and there are many references to the absence of
meaning and shelter for the human beings:
What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself […]
What was it then? […] could the blade cut; the fist gasp? Was there no safety? […]
No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower
into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people that this was life? – startling,
unexpected, unknown? (Woolf, 1992: 125; 166–167)

The sentence “we perished each alone” (Part III, sections 1 and 12) is
repeated in association with Mr. Ramsay and in the end, before the final
image of the picture, a more powerful sentence is given, this time about

41
Mr. Carmichael: “He stood there spreading his hands over all the weak-
ness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly,
compassionately, their final destiny” (Woolf, 1992: 176).
Death is, in Heidegger’s philosophy, part of the Dasein’s project,
“authentic possibility”, a possibility of Dasein’s Being. Death as the
end of Dasein is Dasein’s own most possibility (Heidegger, 1993: 296–
307). The anticipation of death, as it is felt in the third part of To the
Lighthouse, is the recognition that every moment of existence brings
the possibility of death. And death’s implication in existence is felt from
the beginning of the novel. A good example is the initial description of
Mr. Ramsay who thinks that “life is difficult; facts uncompromising;
and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extin-
guished, our frail barks founder in darkness, one that needs above all,
courage, truth, and the power to endure” (Woolf, 1992: 8). In the end,
after reaching the lighthouse it is said about Mr. Ramsay: “He sat and
looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone,
or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said
nothing” (Woolf, 1992: 175).
The problem of the work of art is also considered by Heidegger.
One of the characteristics of the work of art is that it is not reducible to
the world, it imposes itself and contains its own world which it founds
and establishes. It does not testify of or express a world outside or inde-
pendent of itself; it opens and sets up a world. It represents a kind of
project about the unity of being, and truth is fulfilled in it because it
proposes itself as a new way of ordering the totality of being. In it, truth
is fulfilled not only as revelation and opening but also as obscurity and
concealment. This work of art does not only create an inner change in
the world, it also changes being (Heidegger, 2000). Lily thinks:
Where to begin? – that was the question; at what point to make the first mark?
One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and
irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immedi-
ately complex; […] Still the risk must be run; the mark made.
With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same
time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush
descended. […] Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did not know
which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting

42
 she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul. […].
(Woolf, 1992: 135–36)

According to Heidegger, artistic creation is the disclosure of the mys-

terious relation between land (Erde, the basis of the world, the factual
reality) and the world (the opening to the perception of things, a per-
manent realization connected with the land), a never ending dialogue
which is also a conflict. This conflict is the projection of another one in
the Being itself, between Truth and No-Truth. The work of art produces
in man the shock of the Revelation of Being, destroying, at the same
time, the trivial course of life and directing him to the Truth of Being, as
it is always innovating and creative. Transcendence and happening are
the two aspects of the beautiful. The aesthetic realization is a creation
because it gives a meaning to land, and it drives man to share the erup-
tion of Truth (Heidegger, 2000).
One excerpt of “A Sketch of the Past” (Woolf, 1982) points this
out. Woolf writes that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes her
a writer and after giving examples of three exceptional moments she
explains that she feels a blow:
But it is not simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily
life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing
behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words […] From this I
reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that
behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are
connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the
work of art. […] We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And
I see this when I have a shock. (Ibid: 83–84)

In The Waves, she incorporates into a creative work of art the conjunc-
tion of Being and Truth. Both the structure and the theme of the work are
founded in the dialogue between the world – the soliloquies of the six
speakers, talking about their present moments of experience, bending
over their lives and weighing its significance, and the land – the inter-
ludes, which suggest the natural world outside the confines of human
thought, what exists when man is not there, the place where man creates
his world. Consciousness and phenomena are thus thrown into continual

43
counterpoint and through it the characters (or the characteristics of only
one character) are led to a continuous search for Truth and the essence
of Being, as Woolf confides to her diaries. On 27th of February 1926
she wondered about a discovery in life, a restless search for something
she didn’t know exactly what it was; she stated that the mountains, the
sky, the clouds gave her a sense of something there, which was ‘it’; and
emphasized the feeling of her own strangeness, walking on the land, of
the infinite oddity of the human position.
The relation established between consciousness and phenomena,
allows the author to examine the position of the characters before the
fundamental things in human existence and to show their search for the
essence and for Truth. Each position of the sun determines different
attitudes of the characters before the flow of life, and the nearness to
the last one brings more clarity, but no definitive answer. The dialogue
never ends. The use of language, Bernard’s final summing up, the final
form of his life (man’s life), the “book stuffed with phrases”, is the last
attempt (replaced by silence in the last paragraphs) to get to the Truth
of Being:
Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave? A
trickle of water in some gutter where, burbling it dies away? […] But if there are
no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning? Life is not susceptible per-
haps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.
[…] I have seen so many different things, I have made so many different sentences.
[…] And now I ask, ‘Who am I ?’ (Woolf, 1993: 173, 186 and 191)

If for Heidegger the intelligibility of Being-in-the-world expresses

itself as discourse (Heidegger,1993: 203–206), for Woolf a certain use
of language is a necessary instrument for the characters to get to the
meaning of life. Bernard starts the last soliloquy saying that he is going
to sum up, to explain the meaning of his life and that, if possible, he
would hand his life to us entirely. But in order to make us understand
he must tell a story:
But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story
– and there are so many […] How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases
that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust

44
 neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of note-paper. (Woolf, 1993:
155–156)

This language, which Bernard tries to sum up is, therefore, a funda-

mental way to reveal the being of the characters, as individuals and as a
whole, which is shown by their exclusive use of direct speech. For Hei-
degger the word discourse (Rede) includes not only the word but also
silence as a form of discourse. Only the presence of the human being
can give form to this silent discourse and this is what happens between
the nature (interludes) and the human soliloquies in The Waves.
The desire for the Revelation of Being and the eruption of Truth
in Heidegger (Heidegger, 1993: 246–264) may be felt in The Waves
along the whole text and through the interplay of the six characters,
concentrating on Bernard when he stands before death, after having
done with phrases. As in To the Lighthouse, Woolf uses death and a final
imaginative/creative effort to frame her central subjects. And, as in To
the Lighthouse, the last part of the book highlights the element of per-
manence: in the former, the lighthouse will go on and on illuminating
the sea, and in the latter, the movement of the sun evoked throughout
the work is repeated in the two last paragraphs: “Dawn is some sort
of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another
Friday; another twentieth of March […]. Another general awakening.
[…] A bird chirps. […] Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant
rise and fall and fall and rise again”(Woolf, 1993: 192). Language is
situated between what happens and the word which dies with the thing.
The narration of the characters is concentrated, not on detail, not on
realism, but on the substance of reality and tries to expose or external-
ize inner depths, secret reflections, hidden impulses or semiconscious
desires. Thus, the essence, the spirit it reveals, is not transparent through
language, but an inevitable illusion of representation, an attempt to give
the outline. The true word is the articulation of the interior speech of
Being with the human language which translates it, betraying it also
(Heidegger, 1993: 203–205). Bernard comes near to this conclusion in
the final soliloquy, as I showed in the previous quotations. The connec-
tion between death and language starts here. If it is through language
that the individual discovers and understands the world, it is through

45
language -idle talk or Gerede 2, that he interprets and talks about death,
experiencing the death of others (Heidegger, 1993: 296–298 and 211).
Animals don’t die, but perish (verenden). But it is also because there is
death that man speaks, because its Being towards death is made mani-
fest through idle talk, always ambiguous as the manner of talking about
death (Heidegger, 1993: 296–299). Death as the most authentic possi-
bility of the Dasein affects it in attitude and determination. And this is
what happens in The Waves. Death is present there from the beginning.
Here are excerpts from different parts of the work:
But we are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which
we cannot pass. […] But I am aware of our ephemeral passage. […] There is no
stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to
foretell the flight of a word? […] Some will never come into this room again. One
may die tonight. […] But let me consider. The drop falls; another stage has been
reached. Stage upon stage. And why should there be an end of stages? And where
do they lead? To what conclusion? (Woolf, 1993: 15,72,74,113 and 121)

Death brings up the relationship between being and time. Temporal-

ity is one of the elements which determine Dasein. In The Waves, the
“eternity” of nature is related with the transitoriness of human life, and
this is what gives a meaning to the characters’ search and to Bernard’s
final address to Death. Metalanguage, the use of hyper-real characters,
the intensification of self-consciousness and self-reflection, the use of
language as a place for reality construction, the absolute distance of the

2 According to Heidegger “The expression ‘iddle talk’ [“Gerede”] is not to be used

here in a disparaging signification. Terminologically, it signifies a positive phe-
nomenon which constitutes the kind of Being of everyday Dasein’s understanding
and interpreting. For the most part, discourse is expressed by being spoken out,
and has always been so expressed; it is language. But in that case, understanding
and interpretation already lie in what has thus been expressed. In language, as
a way things have been expressed or spoken out [Ausgesprochenheit], there is
hidden a way in which the understanding of Dasein has been interpreted. This way
of interpreting it is no more just present-at-hand than language is; on the contrary,
its Being is itself of the character of Dasein” (1993: 211). And “in setting forth
average everyday Being-towards-death, we must take our orientation from those
structures of everydayness at which we have earlier arrived” (Ibid: 296).

46
narrator, are all important features of modernist literature that become
essential here. More than in any other of her books, Woolf tries in The
Waves to signify the “essence of reality”, the fundamental core of mere
being, bringing the systole-diastole movement of the waves to the heart
of her one/multiple characters. Their human condition, their search,
their experience of time and deaths echo in a narrative structure some
of Heidegger’s ways of understanding and interpreting the world.
If Lily managed to complete her picture and Bernard a “book
stuffed with phrases” (cf. page 44), in Between the Acts the finishing
of the work of art is impossible. In Heidegger’s perspective we would
say that the combat to look for the truth in the being of the work is
never completed; and this happens because the game of the world, the
world of the characters is constantly falling apart; the world from which
Heidegger’s countrywoman is certain, does not exist here and this is
conveyed by the structure of both novel and play: Miss La Trobe organ-
ises a pageant which is played in the gardens of Pointz Hall, a country
house in an English rural village. The structure of the novel is very
much like the structure of the play. The scenes of the pageant can be
read as acts, but the events in the framing narrative may function as the
acts, and the pageant as what comes between them. Both include scraps
of verse, bits of conversation, half-finished sentences, forgotten lines
and words dispersed by the wind. They present disjointed scenes as well
as effective lyrical passages. The audience of the play, and the readers
of the novel work as a unit through the reference to folk songs, nursery
rhymes, literary works, historical events and cultural symbols. Virginia
Woolf creates characters who play characters created by La Trobe, who
recreates characters from earlier dramas, who are parodies of historical
figures. The relationship between the audience/characters and the art-
ists/characters in the play is a game of hiding/revealing: they identify
and diverge, they enlighten and unmask each other, they disperse and
fragment as happens in the final scene of the play, with the mirrors and
in the mingling of characters in the end, problematizing the nature of the
frame that separates truth from fiction. In the structure of the novel there
is no plot and no conclusion; scenes are juxtaposed, images appear and
disappear, the break-up of syntax reveals the fragmentation of a world

47
constantly disintegrating itself. This fracture is disseminated throughout
the text with the use of suspended thoughts, pieces of tunes and songs,
misunderstood poems, the noise of the gramophone, onomatopee, the
sounds of nature, the horns of cars, blank spaces, ellipses and, of course,
the voices of the characters staying in Pointz Hall, the villagers and the
characters of the pageant. There is a mixture of various literary dis-
courses, incompatible but contiguously presented, which brings a satiri-
cal dimension reinforced by the actors’ change of dresses and identities,
and the appearance of their villager identity under the identity of the
character they play. Miss La Trobe frequently interferes to give orders
or to show her disappointment, the audience makes comments and the
whole play is made of these intermissions and gaps, as can be seen in
scene two of the second part of the pageant, after the dialogue between
Flavinda and Valentine, when the villagers sing (Correia, 2006):
“Here came Millie Loder (shop assistant at Messrs. Hunt and Dicksons, drapery
emporium), in sprigged satin representing Flavinda.
Flav. Seven he said, and there’s the clock word for it. […] O Valentine, O!
(They embrace)
The clock strikes nine.
“All that fuss about nothing!” a voice exclaimed. People laughed. The voice
stopped. But the voice had seen; the voice had heard. For a moment Miss La
Trobe behind her tree glowed with glory. The next, turning to the villagers who
were passing in and out between the trees, she barked:
“Louder! Louder!”
For the stage was empty; the emotion must be continued; the only thing to con-
tinue the emotion was the song; and the words were inaudible.
“Louder! Louder!” She threatened them with her clenched fists.
[…]
The words died away. Only a few great names – Babylon, Nineveh, Clymnestra,
[…] floated across the open space. Then the wind rose […] and the audience
sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came. (Woolf,
2002:75)

It in this chaos that the truth tries to make itself work as a combat
between land (Erde) and world, between the villagers’ identity and the
characters’ identity in the play, between open space and hiding. Woolf
defended in “The Narrow Bridge of Art”, (Woolf, 1994.4b) that the

48
novel of the future would be written in a kind of prose that has many
characteristics of poetry and that it will be dramatic, but not a drama.
Heidegger says that art is the happening of truth but this truth cannot
be read from what is common; this truth happens as you poetize. This is
the helpless attempt made in Between the Acts. Considered by criticism,
in Woolf’s global work, as a forerunner of postmodernism, this novel
reflects the third level of resemblance between Heidegger and Woolf ’s
way of creating and interpreting the world; after the bringing out of a
certain truth through art in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Between
the Acts leaves the reader lost in the interpretation of the text, as La
Trobe in the performance of the play, looking desperately, in art and in
the work of art, for the truth of the being.

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9–19.
Doyle, Laura. (1994) “‘These emotions of the body’: intercorporeal
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Woolf, Virginia (1970). “Professions for Women”. In The Death of the
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2. The Hybrid Genesis of the Short Story
in Washington Irving’s The Alhambra

The aim of this article is to show Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alham-
bra centrality in the transition between the second and third phases of
generic1 development of modernist short fiction, revealing the role of
space in the emergence and differentiation of a distinct literary genre.
Irving (1783–59) successfully harmonized the demands of a com-
mercial culture in an emerging mass market, his determination to build
a career as a writer in a family and social milieu traditionally related
with commerce and politics, the tradition of folk tale and legend and a
new representation of the Moors. He changed the valence of the story
of the Moors in the Western imagination (Stevens, 2007: 295), delin-
eating different types of short narrative prose – travel memoirs, folk
tales, descriptive sketches, short story cycle, anecdotes, “fairy stories”,
legends, “marvellous tales”, centred on travel report and storytelling.
The Alhambra: a series of tales and sketches of the Moors and
Spaniards was published in 1832 in the USA and in England. It is the

1 Alastair Fowler (Fowler, 1971:212) refers that genre develops through at least
three principal phases: “During the first phase the genre complex assembles, until
a formal type emerges. When poets first wrote dialogues between shepherds, or
singing contests, these were probably independent motifs. It was only when they
occurred regularly linked with other forms, that readers could respond to them
as genre-sensitive characteristics of eclogue. In phase two, a “secondary” ver-
sion of genre develops: a form that the author consciously bases on the earlier
primary version. He makes the latter an object of sophisticated imitation, in the
Rennaissance sense, varying its themes and motifs, perhaps adapting it to slightly
different purposes, but retaining all its main features, including those of formal
structure. […] But it is also possible to distinguish a tertiary phase of develop-
ment in many genres. This occurs when an author uses a secondary form in a
radically new way”. Irving used traditional tales and legends to create a secondary
version of the tale and the sketch; finally, he used this form in a radically new way.
author’s fourth book of tales and sketches and it reveals Irving’s pas-
sion for Spain, shown in his biography, and his desire to study the tra-
ditional myths of other spaces, namely the European. In parallel, he
could investigate the ancestry of his country as happened for example
with the historical biography of Christopher Columbus, and develop
literary aspirations with a genre or form that was flexible and avoided
the problems created by the censure over novels (cf. page 49). Irving
spent three years in Spain (1826–1829) where he wrote: The History
of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), Voyages and
Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831) and A Chronicle
of the Conquest of Granada (1829). He was appointed as Secretary to
the American legation in London and left Spain for England in July
1829. He returned to New York in May 1832. From 1842 to 1846, he
was Minister/Ambassador to Spain. He had begun taking Spanish les-
sons around 1824 and proposed to Murray that he translate the work of
Miguel de Cervantes, apart from Don Quixote, which he never did; on
January 1826 Irving received a letter from Alexander Everett, inviting
him to assume an honorary position within the US legation where he
would translate manuscripts relating to Cristopher Columbus’s voyages
to the New World. A passport was enclosed. In Spain, he stayed at first
with Obadiah Rich, a bibliophile, whose library contained many vol-
umes on subjects related to Columbus and the Americas; he also met
Martín Fernandez de Navarrete (author of Colección de los viajes y des-
cubrimientos que hicieron por mar los españoles desde el fin del siglo
XV) with whom he examined fifteenth century documents.
Irving was given permission to take residence in the Governor’s
quarters in the Alhambra, which he did on the 12th of May (Irving, 1862:
381) and left on the 29th of July, “after having passed three months there
in a kind of oriental dream” (Letter to Brevoort, Irving, 1862: 408). To
his nephew Pierre, he wrote about the charm of old Spanish literature
and its mixture of “Arabic fervour”, “Castilian pride” and the “sensual
amours of the Italian story”2.

2 “The Spanish language is full of power, magnificence and melody. […] I do not
find anything that delights me more than the old Spanish literature. You will find

54
 He had grown up in a society with very different (or very scarce)
cultural traditions. In 1814 De Witt Clinton, sixth Governor of New
York and also US senator, in the Introductory Discourse before the Lit-
erary and Philosophical Society of New York, summarizes the social
and intellectual development of the country and draws attention to its
disregard for literature and knowledge saying that “the energies of our
country have been more directed to the accumulation of wealth than to
the acquisition of knowledge […] there is nothing in the commercial
spirit that is hostile to literature” (Clinton, 1815: 17). The causes for
this are, according to Clinton, among others, the division into politi-
cal and religious parties, the excessive watching of the parent country
and the dependent position of the infant country, the varied origins and
languages of the population, the use of the country as a place of punish-
ment for felonies and consequent underestimation by European coun-
tries. This attempt to establish a cultural life and a cultural heritage by
the New Yorkers, in which Irving played a central role with his Diedrich
Knickerbocker, was also developed with the club tradition. This was
very much alive in Irving’s New York; his brothers were active members
of the Calliopean society, named after the Greek muse of the heroic
epic; this club, founded on the eve of George Washington’s presidency,
would still exist in 1830 and brought a sense of literary community to
the maturing intellects of Irving’s New York. Before there was a national
literature to adhere to, and a lucrative market for their productions, they
were drawn to one another and Irving was drawn to them (Burstein,
2006: 25). Later, Evert A. Duyckinck, writer, editor and literary critic
would establish a literary salon (1836–55) where the emerging New
York cultural elite would meet.

some splendid histories in the language and then its poetry is full of animation,
pathos, humour, beauty, sublimity. The old literature of Spain partakes of the
character of its people; there is an oriental splendour about it. The mixture of
Arabic fervour, magnificence and romance with old Castilian pride and punctilio;
the chivalrous heroism; the immaculate virtue; the sublimated notions of honour
and courtesy, all contrast finely with the sensual amours, the self-indulgences, the
unprincipled and crafty intrigues which so often form the groundwork of Italian
story”. (Irving 1862, 236)

55
 Why did Irving decide in this context to write short fiction? Partly
because he had some journalistic experience and also because, accord-
ing to his own opinion stated in a letter to Walter Scott, he lacked the
endurance and diligence to write a novel. And probably there were
other reasons. By the turn of the century in the United States, a whole
range of nonfictional reading materials including sketches, captiv-
ity narratives and travel pieces were advertised as novels. Publishers,
booksellers and lending libraries could all promote their business by
indiscriminately applying the label novel to the commodity they dis-
pensed. Yet, the censure of the form, emanating from the pulpit and the
press, remained potent enough so that, until well into the 19th century,
virtually every American novel, somewhere in its preface or its plot,
defended itself against the charge that it was a novel, either by defining
itself differently (“founded in truth”) or by redefining the genre tauto-
logically, as all those things it was presumed not to be – moral, truthful,
educational and so forth. Or newspapers and magazines would serialize
works of fiction under a headnote proclaiming the genre’s moral advan-
tages. These reviewers, by attacking fiction were defending a vision of
society, striving to perpetuate order and trying to warn the readers of
the grave consequences of their unfortunate literary tastes. Denounc-
ing the novel was a civic, religious and educational duty of the right
minded citizen. Fiction was a particular threat to ministerial authority
because the novel, by its nature, ruled out every intermediation that
the preacher was professionally prepared to provide. (Davidson, 1986:
40). This intellectual background certainly contributed to the decision
made by Irving when he chose the form in which his literary aspirations
would take shape.
The reading of English literature (Walter, Scott, Byron, Keats,
Sterne, Goldsmith, Pope) and travel books, made Irving familiar with
the concept of the picturesque and developed his interest for the drawn/
written sketch. The term Picturesque appeared in English usage, near
the beginning of eighteenth century simply as a way of denoting ‘like a
picture’. The French Abbé du Bos writes in 1719 (Reflexions Critiques
sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture): “j’ appele composition pittoresque,
l’arrangement des objets qui doivent entrer dans un tableau par rapport

56
à l’effet general du tableau” (Andrews, 1994: v.1, 6). The term applies
to the way in which objects are organised so as to qualify them for rep-
resentation in a painting. In the 1770s, William Gilpin (1724–1804),
clergyman and schoolmaster, whose travel books would inaugurate the
vogue for Picturesque tourism in Britain, travelled widely (in Britain)
and in his notebook kept a verbal and pictorial record of the scenery
which struck him as most suitable for painting. These records, later
published as a series of volumes of Observations, relative chiefly to
Picturesque Beauty on various parts of the country, constituted the pri-
mary handbooks for thousands of tourists in the last decades of the 18th
century (Andrews, 1996: v.1, 72). In the same manner, Irving made
sketches literally depicting people and place with a crayon, a waxy
charcoal-based pencil ever since he first travelled abroad in 1803, and
Geoffrey Crayon is the author of The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall,
Tales of a Traveller and The Crayon Miscellany, all books of short sto-
ries and sketches. In “The author’s account of himself ”, the introduction
to the Sketch Book, he explains this title and clearly shows the influence
of the picturesque concept; this way of looking at the “scenes of life”,
caught between “beauty, the distortion of caricature and the loveliness
of landscape”3 can be equally applied to his perception of Granada and
his construction of the Tales. Walter Scott described, in the same style,
the progress of his hero Waverly, employing a formulation frequently
used by Irving4.

3 “I have wandered through different countries and witnessed many of the shifting
scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher;
but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque
stroll from the window of one print-shop to another; caught, sometimes by the
delineation of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes
by the loveliness of landscape. As it is the fashion for modern tourists to travel
pencil in hand, and to bring home their portfolios filled with sketches, I am dis-
posed to get up a few for the entertainment of my friends”. (Irving 1843, 3)
4 “Three or four village girls, returning from the well or brook with pitchers and
pails upon their heads, formed more pleasing objects, and with their thin, short
gowns and single petticoats, bare arms, legs and feet, uncovered heads, and
braided hair, somewhat resembled Italian forms of landscape. Nor could a lover

57
 In Tales of the Alhambra, apart from using the picturesque regard
to represent Spain and the Moors, Irving exposes the political intention
of Britain and the United States to discredit Spain’s colonial adminis-
tration. The aesthetics and engineering of the Alhambra had been faith-
fully described, according to the Enlightenment principles by Henry
Swinburne in Travels through Spain (1775), its architectural and deco-
rative antiquities by James Cavanah Murphy in Arabian Antiquities of
Spain (1815) and the history of Moorish civilization by James Murphy
in The History of the Mahometan Empire in Spain (1816). In the begin-
ning of the 19th century, the Moors had been thoroughly woven into
the romantic project that placed medieval Europeans as proto-nation-
alist precursors of the European nation-states (Stevens, 2007: 62) but
from 1815 forward, the Anglo-American project of describing Spanish
history used an idealized Moorish past to subtly – or not so subtly –
demonstrate the unsuitability of Catholic Spain for the discharge of its
colonial responsibilities. This process employed the concepts of Said’s
Orientalism in a reversed direction, the strategy now was aimed at a
Christian state (Stevens, 2007: 63); here, the glorious past was the age
of Islamic Moors (700–1492), while the current Christian rulers were
the backwards and religiously intolerant impediments to progress; the
descriptive categories built for Christian administration was described
as intrinsically inferior to the comparable Islamic one. In Tales of the
Alhambra water is a good example. Spain’s lack of urban infrastructure
was a problem for the traveller because of the absence of potable water,
and most travellers compared contemporary Spain unfavourably with
a (Moorish) society skilled enough to deliver water in plenty as shown
in the Alhambra, whose elegant decorative elements give evidence
of sophisticated technology and availability of fresh water (Stevens,
2007: 66).
Romantic culture had already focused on the Moorish elements
(Chateaubriand, Last of the Abencerrages (1826), Victor Hugo, Les Ori-
entales (1829) and the Scottish Orientalist painter David Roberts), and

of the picturesque have challenged either the elegance of their costume, or the
symmetry of their shape”. (Scott, 1893, chpt. viii)

58
the American writers followed European romantic revival characteris-
tics as Current-Garcia refers in his study on the American short story5.
In Britain, the romantics made use of the Robin Hood tradition
editing and publishing versions of the stories as happened with the rest
of folkloric Europe and with the Moors; Robin Hood could be seen as
a kind of “authorized outlaw”, the same feature that Irving uses in his
descriptions of Spanish bandoleros: “determining to travel in true con-
trabandista style; taking things as we found them, rough or smooth, and
mingling with all classes and conditions in a kind of vagabond com-
panionship” (Irving, 2008: 11); “for the smuggler and the robber are
poetical heroes among the common people of Spain” (Irving, 2008: 8);
“thou the alforjas and the bota were frequently and vigorously assailed
throughout the journey, they had a wonderful power of repletion, our
vigilant squire sacking everything that remained from our repasts at
the inns to supplying these junketings by the road side, which were his
delight” (Irving, 2008: 16).
Two other sources of influence were important to trace Irving’s
conception of these tales. The first is the short fiction in England where
Irving arrived in 1815. There he found: the character–sketch on the
model of The Spectator (description of universal types recognizable in
spite of local costumes); longer works composed by journalists, putting
together a series of satiric, graphic depictions of people; the oriental
tale, inaugurated after the readers had access to English translations of
the Arabian Nights (beginning in 1704); allegoric tales with religious,
virtuous and moral objectives appearing in periodicals (The Spectator;

5 “1. ardent interest in emotion and imagination, awareness of mystery, ecstasy and
yearning locked up in the human heart 2. a fondness for the picturesque, exotic
and sensational manifestations of these feelings 3. a belief in the greater good-
ness of simple, unspoiled humanity and a humanitarian sympathy for the joys
and sorrows of the common man 4. a marked enthusiasm for external nature, the
wilder and more primitive the better 5. a fascination for remote times and places,
which possessed exotic charms in the form of picturesque legends, superstitions
and adventures 6. a tendency to manipulate all these materials so as to idealize
both nature and human nature without too much regard for ‘truth to life’”. (Cur-
rent-Garcia 1952, XII)

59
Review); humorous tales of passion – short novels, some of them trans-
lated from Spanish or French novellas of the 17th century (for example
Maria de Zaya); the Shandean fragment from which some stories were
reprinted in periodicals and many imitations were produced. The second
is the German influence, traceable through The Sketch Book (1819–20),
Bracebridge Hall (1822), and Tales of a Traveller (1824). This was an
important cause in Irving’s development as a romanticist and without
the previous contacts with German literature, The Alhambra is hardly
conceivable. Nevertheless, the Spanish influence, personal and literary,
is directly responsible for the ripening of those romantic fruits which
Scott had sown and German literature had nurtured (Pochmann 1930:
1180). In a letter of 1824 (Irving 1862: II, 66), he reveals his wish to
go beyond mere narrative and find a style “to give a production some
duration”6.
The Alhambra is the crossroads of all these paths and of Irving’s
talent, who, following the standard practice of most of his contemporar-
ies, made the difference in his adaptation of the materials and in his con-
ception of a framework, somewhere between the travel memoir and the
short story cycle (as there is a common space where many stories take
place and an interconnection between some of them), made of tales,
anecdotes and simple stories, all dependent on a narrator who proudly
assumes his storyteller role. In a letter to Brevoort, from Paris in 1824,
Irving shows that the choice of the form was not erratic but carefully
considered, having in mind that in “these shorter writings every page
must have its merit” and “the author must be continually piquant” to be
valued for his “touches of pathos and humour” (Irving, 1862: 225)7.

6 “I have been thinking over the German subjects. […] There are such quantities of
these legendary and romantic tales now littering from the press both in England
and Germany […] I wish in everything I do, to write in such a manner that my
productions may have something more than the mere interest of narrative to rec-
ommend them, which is evanescent […] something depending upon style which
gives a production some chance of duration”. (Irving 1862, II, 66)
7 “I consider a story merely a frame on which to stretch my materials. It is the play
of thought and sentiment and language, the weaving in of characters lightly, yet
expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common

60
 Irving’s frequent references to “universal use of weapons” (Irving,
2008: 7) bandoleros, smugglers and robbers are present all along the
voyage and are used as a picturesque, romantic, beautiful and inspiring
leitmotif of the trip, a part of the scenery, also establishing a contrast with
some of the Moorish marvellous tales; in others, however, as happens
with “Governor Manco and the Soldier” (Irving, 2008: 266) rogues and
contrabandistas are to be ejected out of the fortress, a reforming gesture
of the Governor; but here Irving recalls that “Boabdil and his warriors
were shut up in the mountain by powerful enchantment” and that “all
Spain is a country under the power of enchantment” (Irving, 2008: 273).
There are innumerable examples: “the ominous cross, the monument
of robbery and murder, erected on a mound of stones at some lonely
part of the road, admonishes the traveller that he is among the haunts
of banditti, perhaps at that very moment under the eye of some lurking
bandolero” (Ibid: 9); “He [the commander of a local patrol] told us that
he had a list of all the robbers in the country […] the robbers know me
and know my men’” (Ibid: 14); in “The Author’s Farewell to Granada”
“a long limbed varlet who had been a contrabandista and a robber was
to be our guide and guard” (Ibid: 342).
What is central here, if we focus on the birth of the short story and
in the influence of the marvellous folk tale, is that Irving combines the
travel writing documentary register (chapter ‘The Jesuit’s Library’ and
others) and a kind of recollection of old Moorish supernatural tales and

life; and the half concealed vein of humour that is often playing through the
whole, these are among what I aim at […] I have preferred adopting the mode
of sketches and short tales rather than long works because I choose to take a line
of writing peculiar to myself, rather than fall into the manner and school of any
other writer; and there is a constant activity of thought and a nicety of execution
required in writings of this kind; […] It is comparatively easy to swell a story to
any size when you have once the scheme and the characters in your mind; […] in
these shorter writings, every page must have its merit. The author must be con-
tinually piquant; […] if he succeed, the very variety and piquancy of his writings
– nay, their very brevity, make them frequently recurred to, and when the mere
interest of the story is exhausted, he begins to get credit for his touches of pathos
and humour”. (Irving 1862, 225)

61
folklore and adapts them, always concerned with the presentation of
the value and honourability of the Moorish kings and peoples. At the
same time, he constantly refers his role of storyteller and the passion of
the Spanish people for storytelling (Maria Antonia has “as many sto-
ries at her command as the inexhaustible Scheherezade” (Irving, 2008:
51); and he also informs his reader about the literary options in the
construction of his text – this transforms Tales of the Alhambra into
a repository of subsidiary short story modes and short fiction poetics.
As previously said, you may find in it travel memoir, report, historical
evidence, the marvellous element, folk tales, legends, anecdotes, gothic
mood, emotive love stories (“The Pilgrim of Love”) and considerations
on the dramatic construction of the stories. Irving contributed to the
emergence and differentiation of distinct literary genres, setting a pat-
tern that can be seen almost as a short story cycle. This intersection of
factual history, (through for example, the mentioning of other real and
well known places) with mythic imagination, opened space to the devel-
opment of the modernist short story. In addition to this, the integration
of the enchantment tales in the description of the journey (there are 11
stories) and the references to the value of storytelling deemphasised the
force of the marvellous folk tradition and made the tales seem more
real than the traditional purely imaginative ones. This is also achieved
by other techniques: Irving introduces local customs into his stories and
sketches such as the women’s habit of wearing a rose, he describes local
holidays and celebrations, superstitious beliefs, incorporates Spanish
words, names for places, phrases (“basquina”, “mantilla”), writes the
character’s speeches in Spanish but translates and explains expressions
to his reader. Arabic language is also incorporated and explained (Faka-
hani, 1988: 138–142). Concerned with the revelation of local colour,
Irving presents local characters, many of which he actually met. Good
examples are Mateo Ximenes, Dona Antonia, Kadiga or Perejil. By
using metaphorical techniques to generate several layers of meaning, by
using similes drawn from the natural kingdom, euphonious and rhyth-
mic effects and onomatopoeic words to mediate between the written
text and the auditory experience (Fakahani, 1988: 152–156), by making

62
a careful choice of words, Irving constructs the appropriate atmosphere
for the development of stories which mingle history, his own artistic
and humorous vision of reality, the architectural setting and Spanish
and Oriental folktales. The supernatural elements, included in some
stories are converted in playful characters as happens to the birds in
“Legend of Prince Ahmed Al Kamel or The Pilgrim of Love”8.
The narrator is, as mentioned, one of the most important elements
of the Tales and this shows us Irving’s assumption of the traveller and
the story teller’s role. Making use of his personal and traveller’s expe-
rience and of his emotional reaction to the place, he presents a narrator
who leads his readers through a real storytelling experience, explaining,
recreating, connecting the end of a story with the beginning of the next
(for example “The Veteran” and “The Governor and the Notary”). As
Gifra-Adroher (2000: 144) remarks the chief informant of the narrator
is Mateo Ximenes but despite Ximenes’s gift for telling stories, Irving’s
voice remains dominant9. The power of storytelling is also emphasized
in connection with common people of Spain or even with the parrot of
the “Legend of Prince Ahmed Al Kamel or The Pilgrim of Love”10.

8 “I pray thee my pretty bird, canst thou then tell me what is love?
“Too well can I, my prince. It is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife
and enmity of three. It is a charm which draws two beings together, and unites
them by delicious sympathies, making it happiness to be with each other, but
misery to be apart” […]
“Be not offended, most solemn owl” replied the prince; abstract thyself for a time
from meditation and the moon and aid me in my flight, and thou shalt have what-
ever heart can wish.”
“I have that already,” said the owl; a few mice are sufficient for my frugal table,
and this hole in the wall is spacious enough for my studies; and what more does a
philosopher like myself desire?” (Irving, 2008: 169–173)
9 “The brain of poor Mateo was continually running upon these golden legends”.
(Irving, 2008: 192)
10 “All of these sights and sounds together with the princely seclusion of the place
[…] had a witching effect upon the mind, and drew from some of the company,
versed in local story, several of the popular fancies and traditions connected with
this old Moorish place; they were “such stuffs as dreams are made of ”, but out of
them I have shaped the following legend, which I hope may have the good fortune
to prove acceptable to the reader”; “the common people of Spain have an Oriental

63
 The didactic and moralizing perspective is another link to mythic,
marvellous and traditional story structures. But this connection is not
simple, as it is balanced and counterbalanced by Irving’s own back-
ground and political preconceptions. His approach to the values of a dif-
ferent culture, to otherness, presents different nuances; on one hand he
represents the people of southern Spain using a paternalistic discourse,
on the other his attraction to folk tales and fondness for pictorial rep-
resentation are well known and fully developed in the text (Gifra-Adro-
her, 2000: 138); on one hand, he gives credit and values his informants,
on the other, he places them in their limited contexts, uninterested in
dealing with their real and future lives.
In the Preface to the revised edition (1851) Irving wrote:
Care was taken to maintain local colouring and verisimilitude; so that the whole
might present a faithful and living picture of that microcosm, that singular little
world […]. It was my endeavour scrupulously to depict its half Spanish, half ori-
ental character; its mixture of the heroic, the poetic and the grotesque […] to
record the regal and chivalrous traditions […] and the whimsical and superstitious
legends of the motley race now burrowing among its ruins.

While in the Alhambra, he reported in notebooks and letters that he felt

in the midst of an Arabian tale and would shut his eyes to everything
that called him back to everyday life; he also frequently mentions the
hypnotic state caused by the sound of water. The Alhambra was “a world
elsewhere” (Rubin-Dorsky, 1988: 241) that set his imagination to work.
In “The Court of Lions” (Irving 2008: 99) he uses expressions like
“dreamy palace”, “reveries and picturings of the past”, “illusions of the
memory and imagination” along with considerations on the truthfulness
of some chronicles and letters of Boabdil contemporaries (Irving, 2008:
104). The interpenetration of reality and fantasy allowed Irving to feel
isolated in a fascinating world, an edenic and poetic garden that suited
his tastes, especially because creating “fictions” was not considered a

passion for storytelling, and are fond of the marvelous”;” this parrot is a descend-
ant of the famous parrot of Persia, renowned for his storytelling talent”. (Irving,
2008: 161; 129; 177)

64
very serious occupation in early nineteenth century America. His ide-
alization of the past and contribution to the construction of an upside
down concept of Orientalism is illustrated in one of the last chapters
titled “Spanish Romance”, where he describes his descents into the Jes-
uit’s Library of the University:
Spain is a country apart, severed in history, habits, manners and modes of thinking
from all the rest of Europe. It is a romantic country; but its romance has none of
the sentimentality of modern European romance; it is chiefly derived from the
brilliant regions of the East and from the high minded school of Saracenic chiv-
alry. […]. In the present day when popular literature is running into the low levels
of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal
pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling and wearing
out the verdure of the soul, I question weather it would not be of service for the
reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of
thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance. (Irving,
2008: 312; 314)

References

Andrews, Malcolm, ed. (1994). The Picturesque – Literary Sources and

Documents, 3 vols. Mountfield: Helm.
Boyce, Benjamin (1968). “English short fiction in the eighteenth cen-
tury: a preliminary view”. Studies in short Fiction V: 95–112.
Burstein, Andrew (2006). The Original Knickerbocker – The Life of
Washington Irving. New York: Perseus.
Clinton, De Witt (1815). “An Introductory discourse delivered before
the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York.” Availa-
ble in <http://books.google.pt/books?id=8MwAAAAAYAAJ&pg=
PR5&lpg=PR5&dq=Clinton+Dewit+an+introductory&sou
rce=bl&ots=O5gN_3Dk2s&sig=5hAa977VN063XL9T9
JnhNwC2Z2U&hl=pt-PT&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Clinton%20
Dewit%20an%20introductory&f=false>

65
Current-Garcia, E. and Walton Patrick, eds. (1952). American short
stories – 1820 to the Present. Chicago: Scott.
Davidson, Cathy (1986). Revolution and the World – the rise of the
Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP.
Fakahani, Suzan (1988). “Irving’s The Alhambra: Background, sources
and motifs”. PhD, Florida University.
Fowler, Alastair (1971). “The Life and Death of Literary Forms”. New
Literary History, 2: 199–216.
Gifra-Adroher, Pere (2000). Between History and Romance – Travel
Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth- Century United States.
Madison: Associated University Presses.
Irving, Pierre (1862). Life and Letters of Washington Irving. New York:
Putnam. Available in <http://archive.org/details/lifelettersofwas
02irvi>
Irving, Washington (1843). The Sketch Book. Leipzig: Tauchnitz.
Irving, Washington (1998). The Complete Tales of Washington Irving.
Ed. Charles Neider. New York: DaCapo.
Irving, W. (2008). Tales of the Alhambra. Léon: Everest.
Pfitzer, Gregory M. (2008). Popular History, Literary Marketplace –
1840–1920. Amherst: Univ. Massach. Press.
Pochmann, Henry (1930). “Irving’s German tour and its influence on its
tales”. PMLA 45.4: 1150–1187.
Rubin Dorsky, Jeffrey (1988). Adrift in the Old World – The Psycholog-
ical Pilgrimage of Washington Irving. Chicago: Univ of Chicago
Press.
Scott, Walter (1893). Waverly. Available in <http://www.gutenberg.org/
files/5998/5998-h/5998-h.htm#ch8>
Stevens, Michael (2007). “Spanish Orientalism: Washington Irving and
the romance of the Moors”. PhD diss. Georgia Univ. Available in
<http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/history_diss/8/>.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1970). Introduction à la Literature Fantastique.
Paris: Seuil.

66
3. Regional Narrators: Landscape in the
Short Story Cycle

Landscape is an image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring

or symbolizing the atmosphere that surrounds us; when landscape is
studied as image and symbol, a common ground is found between dif-
ferent disciplines concerned with representation, aesthetics, landscape
and culture: geography, art, literature, social history and anthropology
(Cosgrove/Daniels, 1988:1). To understand the expressions imprinted
by a culture onto its landscape, one needs to know the ‘language’ used,
the symbols and their significance in its frame/context. Most landscape
symbolism reproduces civilizing (cultural) norms and establishes cer-
tain dominant values; landscapes are the product of the appropriation
and transformation of the environment, the natural landscape, by human-
kind, creating a cultural landscape. Symbolism, according to Cosgrove,
is more easily apprehended in more elaborate landscapes such as the
city, the park or the garden but it can be read in rural landscapes and
even in the apparently non-humanized landscapes of the natural envi-
ronment, as happens with the polar landscape. Here, the cultural mean-
ing is a result of space, ostensibly unconquerable by humankind.
In “The Morphology of Landscape” (1925), Carl Sauer (1889–
1975) had already differentiated natural landscape and cultural land-
scape saying that we cannot form an idea of landscape unless we
consider its relations with time and its relations with space. Because
human action is expressed in the cultural landscape, the natural original
one does not exist in many parts of the world. The cultural landscape
is, then, subject to change through the development of culture or the
replacement of cultures. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the nat-
ural environment, the cultural landscape is the result. On the other hand,
even geographers’ descriptions of a place depend on their selection of
elements and on the comparison terms they have known. There is a
personal evaluation of these elements, that is determined by personal
interest, by our own integration and habitat value (Sauer, 1925). Also
Paul Vidal de La Blache in Principes de Geographie Humaine (1921)
had emphasized the importance of humans as active and passive geo-
graphical factors, combining with nature in the transformation of forces
and life conditions.
Before recognizing and describing, one must see, and vision
embodies the physical registration, but also the abstract sense of synthe-
sis, projection and creation of mental images, that can transcend space
and time. Vision implies reworking and pre-working world experience
through imagination, and its expression in the creation of images. The
geographic description used in narrative can interrogate, synthesize and
represent a diversity of atmospheres, places and peoples, just as it can
bring out the dissonances or intersections between the cultural land-
scapes, implied in the narrator’s view of physical landscape. Their rep-
resentation is an “active constitutive element in shaping social and spa-
tial practices and the environments we occupy” (Cosgrove, 2008:15).
Alain Roger (Roger, 1997) proposes the process of artialization
(direct in situ and by the mediation of vision, in visu) as the positive
and aesthetic imitation of nature, its transformation into landscape.
He suggests, for example, that London smog was not acknowledged
and recognized before being evidenced in Turner’s paintings. Cosgrove
reckons that “Romantic nationalism found intense artistic expression
through landscape representations in precisely those fin-de-siècle years
of the nineteenth century” (1998: xxi). The art of the final and the
early years of the twentieth century includes some of the most last-
ing of Europe’s landscapes images, many of them exploring space and
relations to the environment in modern life. He sees landscape as a
discourse that reflects individual and social identities through history,
with its own techniques of expression, relating and framing with other
human groups and with the land, connected with the way one perceives
and sees the environment, with the way one culturally and symboli-
cally interprets it and its objects. These two usages of the concept of
landscape – one denoting an artistic and literary representation of the
visible world, viewed by a spectator and the other considering environ-
ment and integrating natural and human phenomena – are connected

68
and can complete each other. Cosgrove (1985) points out that the land-
scape concept in geography has recently been adopted by humanistic
writers because of its holistic and subjective implications. However,
his focus in this article, is mainly the interpretation of visual images.
Landscape was a ‘way of seeing’ that was bourgeois, individualist and
related to the exercise of power over space. The visual power given
by the landscape way of seeing, complements the real power humans
exert over land as property. This perspective is limited, as the author
recognized in the 1997 Introduction of Social Formation. Issues like
the complex consequences of modernity, genre and post-colonial
points of view, the alterations of conceptions and uses, the relations
of the countryside with the city or of culture and communities should
be considered in the “way of seeing” landscapes (cf. text 7). Lefebvre
recognizes this complexity when he refers interpenetration and super-
imposition as characteristics of social spaces; according to him, visible
boundaries such as walls, rooms or houses may be cut off, in a sense,
from social space, yet still remain part of that space (Lefebvre, 1991:
87) as occurs in Winesburg, Ohio. He also emphasizes that places of
social space are very different from those of natural space, in that they
may be intercalated, combined, superimposed, even collide; the local is
never absorbed by the regional or national level (Ibid: 88). This happens
in the cycles of stories chosen here. I intend to consider the relation
between landscape and the construction of text, in an attempt to show
that the cycle structure and the use of a pivotal narrator, reveal cultural
and social complexities in the interpretation and representation of the
landscape, resulting from economic and commercial transitions. For
example, there was a growing sense of unity among formerly isolated
people, but proximity also generated anxiety (Kern,1983). Though pri-
marily focused on the analysis of landscape, James and Nancy Duncan
brought an important contribution to the field, when they suggested that
landscapes could be seen as texts which are transformations of ideolo-
gies into a concrete form, an important way in which ideologies become
naturalized. They also suggested that the concepts of textuality, inter-
textuality and reader reception may be of importance to those interested
in the notion that landscapes are read much in the same way as literary

69
texts. For them, what is lacking in the radically relativistic theoretical
perspective of much of twentieth-century literary theory, is a considera-
tion of the socio-historical and political processes through which mean-
ing is produced and transformed (Duncan & Duncan, 1988). Ideology
and naturalization seem to me, one of the simpler and most objective
ways to connect landscape to text; all the narrators of the four cycles
of stories in question here, are writers who have an ambiguous position
in the community and textualize the landscape and the community they
observe, reading it according to their ideology and intention.
The short story cycle structure allows the study of multiple inde-
pendent, yet interlinked real and symbolical places, and at the same
time, of their situation and progression in a specific community land-
scape. It also happens, that the narrator’s cultural landscape is revealed
and may be in dissonance with the physical and symbolic landscape
constructed in the narrative. In the cycles of stories/sketches I will deal
with, a writer assumes his/her storyteller role from a specific space and
in a specific landscape, not to be totally identified with the places he/
she describes: Irving’s narrator in Tales of the Alhambra (1832) declares
that the author of the work came to Spain on a rambling expedition,
with a friend, out of curiosity, Sherwood Anderson in “The Book of
the Grotesque”, Winesburg, Ohio (1919) writes from a house with high
windows from where he could not look at the trees, Sarah Orne Jewett
in The Country of Pointed Firs (1896) from “a little white schoolhouse”
from where there was “a most beautiful view of sea and shore” (Jewett,
1995: 10), Daudet in Les Lettres de mon Moulin (1869), from the old
Provence mill that he had bought. The first three are composed cycles
and Daudet’s a completed cycle.
The first example of the use of landscape in the construction
of an embryonic cycle of stories is Washington Irving’s Tales of the
Alhambra1. This volume, which is central to the development of the
short story, delineates different types of short narrative: travel memoir,
folk tale, descriptive sketch, anecdote, fairy tale, legend, “marvellous

1 Part of the content on Tales of The Alhambra is a summarized version of the ideas
expressed in text 2.

70
tale” (Irving, 2008: 196), short story cycle. There is a common space
where many stories take place and an interconnection between many
of them. Irving spent about three months in the Governor’s quarters
in the Alhambra in 1829 and three years in Spain, to translate manu-
scripts relating to Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the New World.
He arrived in a place, whose salons during the nineteenth century had
been converted into taverns, and occupied by thieves and beggars.
Between 1802–1812 Napoleonic troops converted it into barracks, and
two towers were mined and blown up; only in 1870 was the Alhambra
declared a National monument and today a World Heritage site. Irving
makes frequent references to “bandoleros, smugglers, robbers, banditti
and the use of weapons” but he faces them as a picturesque, roman-
tic, beautiful and an inspiring leitmotif of the trip, part of a scenery
where he felt “in the midst of an Arabian tale”, a “dreamy palace” (Ibid:
99), which stimulated his imagination and reveries. As he describes the
journey, the Palace, its most beautiful rooms and halls, its inhabitants
and local traditions, he tells his reader tales that intersect factual space
and history, real place with mythic imagination, symbolic place, always
emphasising the value and honourability of the Moorish kings and
peoples. He combines the travel-writing documentary register, with a
kind of recollection of old Moorish supernatural tales and folklore, and
adapts them. What does this use of space reveal? What does it mean
in cultural terms? Irving was determined to build a career as a writer,
distancing himself from a family and social milieu traditionally related
to commerce and politics, at a time when creating “fictions” was not
considered a very serious occupation; he combined Scott’s romanticism
with Scott’s love of the picturesque, the “authorized outlaw” tradition
of Robin Hood, the character sketch model, the Moorish representation
tradition, an interest in Spain and its Islamic heritage, through authors
like Henry Swinburne or James Cavanah Murphy; on the other hand,
the New York community leaders were interested in creating a solid
literary tradition and in weakening Spanish colonial control by con-
trasting the glorious Moorish past with the current inept, intolerant and
unprogressive Catholic rulers. As to the Moors, by the nineteenth cen-
tury they had been thoroughly woven into the Romantic project that

71
placed medieval Europeans as proto-nationalist precursors of Euro-
pean nation-states. The Anglo-American project of describing Span-
ish history used and idealized the Moorish past subtly or not subtly to
demonstrate the difficulties of Catholic Spain with its colonies. This
process employed the techniques of Said’s Orientalism, yet the strategy
is aimed at a Catholic state. An example is the reference to water in
Tales of the Alhambra – Spain’s lack of urban infrastructure and the
absence of potable water was a problem for the traveller who inevita-
bly compared contemporary Spain unfavourably with a society skilled
enough to deliver water in plenty, evidence of sophisticated technology,
as happened in the Alhambra (Stevens, 2007). The Spanish physical
landscape is thus envisioned differently and manipulated to another
end, but Irving’s cultural landscape is in the backstage. Starting from
a literary culture that was European dominated, but eager to establish
a new cultural tradition, Irving went to the Old World to look for the
roots of America through the study of Columbus documents, as he had
drawn from German literature and tradition to write “Rip van Winkle”.
Cosgrove argues that landscape is a cultural expression of social rela-
tions with land and that, in this case, American landscape up to 1845
was a mixture between the “little tradition” of less literate people who
shaped the land and the “great tradition” of a well-read public, literate,
innovative merchants, rulers and scholars (Cosgrove, 1998:162). And
there were other factors. A sense of literary community sustained the
maturing intellects of New York, expressed, for example in the club
tradition and in the societies that existed, before there was a national
literature to adhere to and a literary market for its production. The novel
was censured, both by the clergy and by literary reviewers, and pub-
lishers promoted sketches, travel pieces, biographies and other shorts
pieces of work. The publishing industry, still in need of protection from
foreign competition, was starting to presage mass production and mass
consumption (Davidson, 1986). Irving transformed his cultural land-
scape and his personal vision, adapting them to suit both European and
American audiences. In the sketch titled “Spanish Romance” he praises
Spain as a country apart, its manners, habits, its chivalry-derived

72
romanticism, encouraging the reader to turn to the records of prouder
times and romance (cf. quotation of page 65).
The second group of stories, Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Ander-
son, constructed as a short story cycle (Philips, 1951) shows, through
two kinds of landscape, the interdependence of the stories relating a
primitive past, a conflicting present and an unpredictable future. One
has, on the one hand, the description of the physical landscape of a
community that is going through the Second Industrial Revolution tran-
sition period (“in the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in
the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place”; “as the
time of factories had not yet come, the labourers worked in the fields or
were section hands on the railroads” – Anderson, 1999:48;149) and on
the other hand, defined from the start in a kind of Prologue, through a
narrator who distances himself ironically from the stories and reflects
about art and society, a depiction of the psychic deformity, spiritual iso-
lation and grotesque solitude of the inhabitants of the village (“Louise
was from childhood a neurotic, one of the race of over sensitive women
that in later days industrialism was to bring in such great numbers into
the world”; “The dullness of the passing hours led to his drinking harder
than ever” – Anderson, 1999: 62;13). From this perspective, Winesburg
is a “pseudo-realistic locale”, in a landscape created by the narrator’s
imagination (Ingram,1971).
The physical space is structured around three different types of
landscape:
1. Interior and decaying spaces, frequently symbolizing human iso-
lation and frustrated attempts to establish intimate relationships. The
description of these spaces frequently focuses on windows, verandas
and parlours and on their relation to the surrounding landscape. 2. The
natural beauty of the countryside (the idealized landscape) and its natu-
ral tasks, frequently contrasted with squalor and miserable human rela-
tionships. 3. Growing industrialism and the development of cities.
As Ingram states (Ibid: 181), a Winesburg room reinforces the
character of its inhabitant by its location and interior arrangement. The
chief furnishings of most of the rooms (a window, a chair and a bed)
point to lying down, dreaming, staring out of the window, observing in

73
a debilitating stasis, and also to the connection with the external world,
the town and its people. This is what happens to the old writer of “The
Book of the Grotesque”, except for the open door of the room, which
helps him recall the past and listen to other voices; Wing Biddlebaum
stands on the “half-decayed veranda of a small frame-house that stood
near the edge of a ravine” (Anderson, 1999: 11), Dr. Reefy “sat all day
in his empty office close by a window that was covered by cobwebs”
(Ibid:18); David Hardy, the son of Louise Bentley, could not bear to go
into the house where his mother and father lived” (Ibid:53); to Jesse,
her father, she says that the farm was no place for her and “the air of the
house did me no good. It was like poison in my blood” (Ibid:55); the
most revealing presentation of room symbolism is in the story “Lone-
liness” – “the story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room almost more
than it is the story of a man” (Ibid:136).
The contrast between the natural landscape beauty of the coun-
tryside and the pleasure of natural tasks, but also the poverty and the
absence of connection and balanced human relationships in the commu-
nity, is presented from the opening of the first story: “across a long field
that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop
of yellow mustard weeds […] The berry pickers, youths and maidens,
laughed and shouted boisterously […] The feet of the boy in the road
kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing
sun” (Ibid:11); in stories like “The Untold Lie”, in which Ray Pearson is
saddened by the beauty of autumn; in “Godliness – a tale in four parts”,
the pleasantness and prosperity of the farms is contrasted with the
grandfather’s religious craziness; and in “Adventure”, “the delightful
country of Winesburg” (Ibid:88) is associated with Ned’s abandonment
of Alice. Agricultural labour as fruit and berry raising and all its hard-
ships, the poverty of the houses and the crying of children (Ibid:150)
are referred to in “The Thinker” (Ibid:106) and “An Awakening”, as
George Willard becomes slowly conscious of what he wants: “as the
time of factories had not yet come, the labourers worked in the fields
or were section hands on the railroads […] The houses in which they
lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at
the back. The more comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a

74
pig, housed in a little shed at the rear of the garden” (Ibid:149). The Fair,
the only, though depersonalized, sign of community life is defined as a
place of death: “on all sides are ghosts, not of dead, but of living people
[…] Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from the
hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board walls
[…] The place has been filled to overflowing with life” (Ibid:198).
Growing industrialization and its development is referred to in
“Godliness – a tale in four parts”, through a description of industrialism
and its consequences in the lives of people; after describing country life
during and twenty years after the Civil War, the narrator refers to the
changes brought about in the last fifty years from his own contemporary
point of view:
It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later day to
understand Jesse Bentley […] A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming
of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs […] the going and
coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban carlines […]
and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremen-
dous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America.
Books, badly imagined and written, though they may be in the hurry of our times,
are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers
are everywhere […] The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities.
(Ibid: 48–49)

This change is clearly defined in the end when, in the last look of
George Willard out of the car window, “the town of Winesburg had
disappeared” (Ibid: 204).
As can be seen in the latter quotation, the narrator looks and
describes the town from an ulterior place and time, a subsequent stage
of transition, and this view brings him a distanced and ironic look, in
which the human grotesque could be the consequence of the transfor-
mation of social relations with the land. Ingram rightly points out that
the passage looks like part of the editorial page of a Cleveland news-
paper and not like a short story. This shows the use of a single narrator
who, controlling the material of his fancy, assumes a traditional story-
teller voice in the narration of completely related stories. This narrator
presents, from a privileged point of view and without restrictions of

75
chronology or limitations of space, the psychologically related figures
he has globally sketched in the prologue. Examples of the breaking of
the illusion of reality are intrusions such as: “Let us look briefly into
the story of the hands […] It needs the poet here” (Ibid: 14); “the room
in which young Robinson lived in New York faced Washington Square
and was long and narrow like a hallway. It is important to get that fixed
in your mind” (Ibid: 136). But this also shows the dissonance between
the cultural landscape of the narrator and the landscape of the village
described, as happened with Washington Irving.
If in Anderson’s work the book is organized around individual lives
and personal histories, as the titles reveal (“Hands – concerning Wing
Biddlebaum”, “Mother – concerning Elizabeth Willard”, “Loneliness –
concerning Enoch Robinson”), in The Country of Pointed Firs, by
Sarah Orne Jewett, space and landscape share protagonism with people,
as acknowledged by the critics who consider it a transcendental text
(Richardson, 1998), and this is revealed again by the titles – in 21
sketches ten titles refer to community places (“The Schoolhouse”, “At
the Schoolhouse window”, “Green Island”, “Where pennyroyal grew”,
“Along shore”, “The Great Expedition”, “The Bowden reunion”). Leav-
ing aside the question of the classification (Portales, 1982), this group
of sketches as Jewett called them, is structured and defined from natu-
ral life and geography of a pre-industrial rural and fishing community
at the end of the nineteenth century. The outer space – the distances
between the islands and the houses of the same island determine the
construction of a community life (the great expedition to the Bowden
reunion), concerned, as Sandra Zagarell (1988) states, with small scale
activities and daily tasks and with visits, conversations, retelling of sto-
ries, excursions, rituals, that maintain continuity and reaffirm collective
life. Characteristically, there is no division between home life and work
life because there are no industrial city standards to reach. The houses
are a good example of this, beginning with Mrs. Todd’s. Her house is
small, modest, organized around one chimney (Ammons, 1994:85)
and central to the villagers because of her healing herbs. Outdoors and
indoors intermingle, with the garden entering the house in the form
of various scents and Mrs. Todd moving between house and garden as

76
between two rooms, representing the harmony between two worlds and
the absence of barriers between public and private realms. The gates,
doorways and windows are used to communicate, and the narrator fre-
quently emphasises visual pleasure. Mrs. Blackett’s house, situated on
a different island, is another important symbolic space connected with
the pennyroyal, matriarchy (matrifocality), autonomy (“the orderly
vine”), beauty (“gay flowers”, “the greenery”). The real landscape of
the Bowden reunion – “a [magnificent] low- storied and broad roofed
house in the green fields, as if it were a motherly brown hen, where
five generations of sailors and farmers had grown […] The grove was
so large that the great family looked far smaller than it had in the open
field” (Jewett, 1995: 77; 79) – accommodates the adequate human and
cultural landscape – a celebration of traditional family values, mother-
hood, patriotism and environment and for some, the triumphant coloni-
zation of Anglo-Norman culture on American soil.
But landscape not only shapes people but is shaped by them. Sarah
Orne Jewett established dissonance when she created a clearly female
geography in an idyllic landscape and when she produced Dunnet as a
pure and homogeneous community, banishing its relation to contempo-
rary America.2 In the book, all the markers of industrialism and other
conditions of later nineteenth-century life have disappeared, to retain
all the simplicity of local life. However, South Berwick, where Jewett
was born, was a stop on the railroad. Orne Jewett graduated from the
Berwick Academy in 1866, went frequently to Boston and Newport,
attended exhibitions and receptions and was a member of the literary
circle of Annie Fields. Yet, the Dunnet community is entirely congru-
ent with its particular geography. As Mrs Todd says: “Every such tree
has got its own livin’ spring; there’s folks made to match ‘em” (Jewett,
1995:4). The narrator is physically located in the community place but
comes from a neighbouring society, and this is betrayed by her responses
and points of view as observer. While appearing to present Dunnet from
its own landscape, the narrator repeatedly locates it in relation to con-
temporary urban America. She implicitly evaluates “community” as

2 On this see Zagarell, 1994.

77
different and better than “society”; she frequently uses “simple”, “sim-
plicity” and “innocence”, which implies a contrastive relation to their
opposite meanings. Mrs Blackett’s description as a “delightful little
person herself, with bright eyes and an affectionate air of expectation
like a child on holiday”, or the observation about Mrs. Todd that “an
absolute archaic grief possessed this countrywoman”, are discourses
that emerge from a culture other than the fishing village. As Zagarell
refers, many of the interpretations of the narrator seem aimed at more
sophisticated readers, as happens with classical references in the chap-
ters of the Bowden reunion. Even the Bowdens are, in part, uncharac-
teristic of the homogeneous fishing community. This conflict of voices
or heteroglossia implies the recognition of a physical landscape, that
is again permeated by a different cultural landscape and that is, as in
Winesburg, Ohio, the result of transformations of social relations with
the land. The perspective of Duncan & Duncan can be applied here in
that there is a group of people who share a common understanding of
the landscape that surrounds them and a narrator, apparently exterior to
the community, who is a writer and textualizes this landscape, from his
own point of view.
Just as the narrator of Country implies two different spaces, the
narrator of Lettres de Mon Moulin (1869) by Alphonse Daudet (and
Paul Arène), titled at first Chroniques Provençales, assumes that he
is writing in Provence and about Provence, although Paris – implying
two worlds in comparison – is present in the texts such as “Le poete
Mistral” or “Le porte feuille de Bixiou”. After installing himself in the
mill in Fontvieille, that he fictionally bought to write, the narrator sends
to a correspondent in Paris, a sequence of stories (the titles are again
expressive: “La chèvre de M. Seguin”, “La mule du pape”, “Les sau-
terelles”), depicting Provence geography and manners. The first text of
the cycle, named “Avant-Propos”, is the bill of sale registration of a
mill, situated in the valley of the Rhone, sold to Alphonse Daudet, poet,
living in Paris. And at the beginning of most texts the narrator/author
signals that the place from where he is writing is the mill: “C’est de
là que je vous écris, ma porte grande ouverte, au bon soleil” (Daudet,
1972:11); “C’etait le jour de mon arrivée ici. J’avais pris la diligence

78
de Beaucaire” (Daudet, 1972: 15); “Francet Mamai, un vieux jouer de
fifre, qui vient de temps en temps faire la veillée chez moi, en buvant
du vin cuit, m’a raconté l’autre soir un petit drame de village dont mon
moulin a été temoin” (Ibid: 23); “pour aller au village en descendant
de mon moulin, on passe devant un mas” (Ibid: 61). It is still from the
mill, during a sleepless night, that the narrator/author tells the Corse
stories; and the “travelling notes” in Algeria start again from the mill:
‘cette fois, je vous emmène passer la journée dans une jolie petite ville
d’Algerie à deux ou trois cents lieues du Moulin’ (Ibid: 239). Provençal
life is Daudet’s assumed inspiration, but the role of the French Midi in
Daudet’s works may be questioned. Although he met Mistral and the
most prominent writers of the Felibridge movement, the poets who had
vowed to work for the rehabilitation of the Provençal language and liter-
ature, he grew up in a bourgeois family, was never a bilinguist and spent
only a few months in the southeastern region during his forty-seven
years of Parisian life. He tried to make his Parisian readers understand
the Provençal manner and arouse their interest in his native land, refer-
ring to folklore and institutions, calling attention to linguistic peculiari-
ties of its regional French, which he had probably spoken very little. At
the end of the story “La chevre de M. Seguin” he writes: “Adieu Grin-
goire! L’histoire que tu as entendu n’est pas un conte de mon invention.
Si jamais tu viens en Provence, nos ménagers te parleront souvent de
la cabro de moussu Seguin, que se battégue touto la neui emé lou loup,
e piei lou matin lou loup la mangé. Tu m’entends bien, Gringoire. Et
piei lou matin lou loup la mange” (Ibid: 47). With the telling of stories,
customs, legends, Daudet shows all the landscape: the sun, the blue sky,
the wheat, the vines, the scented plants and herbs, the animals: rabbits,
goats, donkeys, cicadas, sheep and others. The use of the mill, a char-
acteristic structure of the region, to symbolise and describe Provence,
transformed into a lighthouse and poetical working room, unifies the
construction of the book. However, the last sketch is a nostalgic evoca-
tion of Paris, whose spaces, as happens with many regionalist writers,
pursue the author to Provence. Daudet understood his Felibridge friends
and sympathized with their cause but did not consider that the language
could be taught in French elementary schools, as was claimed by them.

79
His cultural distance, which intersects the physical geography of the
stories of the volume, is clear in the sketch “Le poete Mistral”, a story
about his meeting with the poet in Provence:
Tandis que Mistral me disait ses vers dans cette belle langue provençale, plus
qu’aux trois quarts latine, que les reines ont parlé autrefois et que maintenant nos
pâtres seuls comprennent, j’admirais cet homme au-dedans de moi et, songeant à
l’état de ruine ou il a trouvé sa langue maternelle et ce qu’il en a fait, je me figurais
un de ces vieux palais des princes des Baux […] plus de toits, plus de balustres
aux perrons […] Puis, voilá qu’un beau jour le fils d’un de ces paysans s’éprend
de ses grandes ruines et s’indigne de les voir ainsi profanées.(Ibid: 201–2)

In all the mentioned cycles of stories there is a starting, central place

from where the narrator assumes his/her writing or storytelling inten-
tion. All of them explore space and landscape in a sequence and in dif-
ferent degrees of interdependence, physically and symbolically, using
the narrator’s cultural landscape as a dissonant or questioning counter
text. This contributes to the creation of an interface between material
and mental landscapes, the human landscape studied through human-
istic approaches, namely narrative and symbolism and the material
landscape that can be seen and touched. It deals with the differences in
landscape values, resulting from different cultural perspectives, helping
to understand societies, subcultures, socio-cultural groups and identi-
ties. The writer may be one of the central figures in the construction of
this interface, a frame where he sees two pictures at once, his and the
place he is facing. As Eudora Welty writes in “Place in Fiction”:
Place, to the writer at work, is seen in a frame. Not an empty frame, a brimming
one. Point of view is a sort of burning-glass, a product of personal experience
and time; it is burnished with feelings and sensibilities, charged from moment to
moment with the sun-points of imagination. It is an instrument-one of intensifi-
cation; it acts, it behaves, it is temperamental. We have seen that the writer must
accurately choose, combine, superimpose upon, blot out, shake up, alter the out-
side world for one absolute purpose, the good of his story. To do this, he is always
seeing double, two pictures at once in his frame, his and the world’s, a fact that he
constantly comprehends; and he works best in a state of constant and subtle and
un-fooled reference between the two. (Welty, 1956)

80
References

Ammons, E. (1994). “Material Culture and Empire”. In June Howard

(ed) New Essays on The Country of Pointed Firs, Cambridge, Cam-
bridge UP. 81–100.
Anderson, Sherwood (1999). Winesburg, Ohio. Oxford: Oxford UP
(1st ed: 1919).
Cosgrove, Denis (1985). “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of
the Landscape Idea”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geog-
raphers, New Series, 10. 1: 45–62.
Cosgrove, Denis and Daniels, Stephen (1988). The Iconography of
Landscape – Essays on symbolic representation, design and use of
past environments. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Cosgrove, Denis (1998). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape.
Wisconsin: Univ. of Wisconsin Press (1st ed: 1984; Introduction:
1997).
Cosgrove, Denis (2008). Geography and Vision, – seeing, imagining
and representing the world. London: Tauris.
Daudet, Alphonse (1972). Lettres de mon Moulin. Paris: Fasquelle
(1st ed: 1869).
Davidson, Cathy (1986). Revolution and the Word – the Rise of the
Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP.
Duncan, J. and Duncan, N. (1988). “(Re) reading the Landscape”. EDP
Society and Space, 6.2: 117–126.
Ingram, Forrest (1971). Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twen-
tieth Century – Studies in a Literary Genre. n.p. Mouton.
Irving, Washington (2008). Tales of the Alhambra. Léon: Everest (1st
ed: 1832).
Jewett, Sarah Orne (1995). The Country of Pointed Firs and Other Sto-
ries. London: Penguin (1st ed: 1896).
Kern, Stephen (1983). The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918.
Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. Transl. Donald
Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell (1st ed: 1974).

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Philips, William L. (1951). “How Sherwood Anderson wrote Wines-
burg, Ohio”. American Literature, 23.1: 7–30.
Portales, Marco (1982). “History of a Text: Jewett’s The Country of
Pointed Firs”. The New England Quarterly, 55.4: 586–592.
Richardson, Melissa (1998). “A revisitation of transcendentalism
within Sarah Orne Jewett The Country of Pointed Firs”. Availa-
ble at <http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/richardson.
htm>.
Roger, Alain (1997). Court Traité du Paysage. Paris: Gallimard.
Sauer, Carl (1925). “The morphology of Landscape” available at
<http://www.colorado.edu/geography/giw/sauer-co/sauer-co.
html>, Accessed April 2011.
Stevens, Michael (2007). “Spanish Orientalism: Washington Irving and
the Romance of the Moors”. PhD diss, Georgia University.
Welty, Eudora (1956). “Place in Fiction” available at <http://nbu.bg/
webs/amb/american/5/welty/place.htm>. Acessed in Nov. 2011.
Zagarell, Sandra (1988). “Narrative of Community: the Identification
of a Genre”, Signs, 13.3. 498–527.
Zagarell, Sandra (1994). “Country’s Portrayal of Community and the
Exclusion of Difference”. In June Howard (ed.) New Essays on The
Country of Pointed Firs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 39–60.

82
4. K. Mansfield’s “The Escape” – An Epiphany
on Impossibility

The purpose of this essay is to analyse the use of literary epiphany in

Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, her conception of the technique,
the influences she received in this respect, to connect it with modernism
and, in the end, to discuss the short story “The Escape” as a demonstra-
tion of what was said. As referred in the Introduction, the short story
is defined by brevity and concentration in fragmentation, subjectivism,
apprehension and description of an isolate and definite moment. Fre-
quently contrasted with the novel (associated with time), the short story
sense of temporality resonates against the short story spatial base, and
readers move in time from beginning to the end and back again (Rohr-
berger, 2004:7). Epiphany reflects time-space condensation, a freezing
of the flux of time in a specific space, similar to Wordsworth’s “spots of
time” in the “Prelude”. Some short fiction theorists, like Clare Hanson
or Suzanne Ferguson (1982) even defend that epiphany is the structural
core of modernist short fiction, as it emphasizes a unique moment of
significant or intense experience, that the short story form adequately
conveys (Hanson, 1985: 55). The epiphanic moment is a break in time
continuity, a revelation that has much of intuitive or absurd, a halt that
is materialized in a space. The short story brevity is suitable to explore
this spatial form structure and Mansfield, whose literary reputation is
based on modernist short story, frequently used epiphany in the con-
struction of her works.
Critical studies on Katherine Mansfield have emphasized narrative
techniques such as a multiplicity of voices, irony, or the absence of a
narrator, allied to the use of symbolism.1 In conjunction with these

1 Cf. Dunbar, 1997; Dowling, 1976; Fullbrook, 1986; Hanson and Gurr, 1981;
Kaplan, 1991; Van Gunsteren, 1990; Zinman, 1973; Kobler, 1990.
techniques, her use of the revelatory or ‘epiphanic’ moment is impor-
tant from a technical and thematic perspective, as it integrates in the
modernist time-space conventions and the genre’s brevity.
Epiphany is used to mark a climax in the narrative, sometimes by
way of a flashback, through a sudden reappraisal of a moment from the
past, thereby bringing together or dispersing several narrative strands.
It often appears associated with a ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative,
involving space and time manipulation, discontinuity and inconsist-
ency, irony and symbolism. There is an intimate connection between the
development of the structure of epiphany, modernism and the evolution
of the short story, and it is also clear that its breadth and complexity
gives way to ambiguity, and occasionally to duality and confusion2.
This connection takes place because the structural brevity of the short
story very frequently requires a sudden revelation to change the course
of events, and also because early modernism concentrated on the
moment and introspection. A good example is James Joyce, who wrote
about the importance of epiphany for the writer (see footnote 3), mate-
rializing his theory in the short stories of The Dubliners.
In modern literary epiphany, the experience of perception and its
transformation into verbal language is essential; language shows the
essence of experience, emphasizing the power of the mind. On the other
hand, the transformation of an everyday detail into visionary signifi-
cances (“the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance
or strictly relevance of whatever produces it” (Beja, 1971:18)), of the
worldly into the transcendent through the imagination, the apprehen-
sion of the wider and more abstract meanings of life through the most
humble and personal manifestations, offer the reader and the critic a
space for interpretation, which frequently dominates modernist fiction.
Mansfield’s famous short story, “The Fly”, is a good example. The
death of the fly in the end, drowned in ink by the boss, and the last sen-
tence about him, leave the reader at a loss before the interpretation of a
humble detail and an abstract question.

2 On this see Wilson/Kimber/Reid, 2011.

84
 The most decisive modernist artist to stamp the concept of literary
epiphany into his work is James Joyce, particularly in Stephen Hero3,
with his explanation of the three phases of artistic apprehending –
wholeness (integritas), harmony (consonantia) and radiance (claritas)
– in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The use of epiphany
in this author’s work is crucial in guiding criticism towards the study
of the epiphanic moment as a structural technique of modernist liter-
ature. Based on an analysis of Joyce, Morris Beja, in Epiphany in the
Modern Novel, draws attention to the ‘Criteria of Incongruity’: ‘there
is no epiphany unless the revelation is not strictly relevant to whatever
produces it’, ‘Insignificance’ – the incident which triggers epiphany
must be trivial or insignificant – in determining epiphany, and to the
Joycean distinction between an epiphany originating in an ordinary
object, event, snatches of conversation or a gesture or in some ‘mem-
orable phase of the mind’, materialized in the dream-epiphany’ (Ibid:
14–15). The volume Moments of Moment (Tigges, 1999) brings two
noteworthy essays to this discussion: one of them, by him, is a ‘state
of the art’ on the field, discussing all the different theoretical concepts
presented before and offering a systematized typology of epiphany; the
other, by Rachel Falconer analyses the connection between short fiction
and the sense of time. Tigges starts from Nichols’ distinction (Nichols,
1987:74–75) between proleptic and adelonic epiphany and considers
two subcategories in the adelonic type: those resulting from dreams and

3 ‘By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgar-

ity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed
that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care,
seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments […]
First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is
an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the
parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise
that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment
of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is
so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. (Originally
published in Stephen Hero, ed. by Theodore Spencer. New York: New Directions,
1944. Reprinted in What is the Short Story? ed. by Eugene Current-Garcia and
Walton Patrick. Illinois: Scott, 1974. 99–101).

85
those triggered off by events; then he goes on refining these into five
sub-types (Tigges, 1999: 27–28)4.
Mansfield used the expressions ‘blazing moment’, ‘glimpse’ and
‘central point of significance’, to describe this technique, illustrated in
the closure of “The Escape”. In her diary she wrote:
And yet one has these ‘glimpses’ before which all that one ever has written […]
all […] that one ever has read pales…The waves as I drove home this afternoon,
and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell…. What is it that
happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment (what do I
mean?) the whole life of the soul is contained.
[…] Let me take the case of K. M. She has led, ever since she can remember, a
very typically false life. Yet, through it all, there have been moments, instants,
gleams, when she has felt the possibility of something quite other. (Mansfield,
1952: 202–203; 330)

This conception is partly a result of the influence exercised on Mans-

field by Wordsworth, the French symbolists, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde,
Anton Chekhov and Walt Whitman.
Mansfield was profoundly influenced by Chekhov throughout her
career as a writer. On the notion of narrative strategies, his writing
revealed to her a direction which she took up in her own idiosyncratic
way, particularly with the inner revelation of characters, the analysis of
the emotional effects of a certain event through the description of appar-
ently insignificant moments, common incidents coated with a special
significance, the use of certain tones and inflections, which accumulate
in order to impress the reader, and finally by removing the need for an
obvious narrator. The short story “The Child-who-was-tired” (1910) is
one of the best examples.
Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)
and Studies in Prose and Verse (1904) gave Mansfield the opportu-
nity to understand French symbolism. Clare Hanson mentions several
references to this author and excerpts of his texts in early Mansfield
notebooks; these references deal with objectivity in the description
of the state of the soul (Hanson, 1987: 9–10). The word “objectivity”

4 See also Bidney, 1997.

86
is used in the sense of transmitting abstract states of mind or feelings
through images or objective symbols (gestures or other subtle elements
that function as a code), instead of describing them analytically. This
way of transmitting the abstract through the objective or material (a
similar technique to that used in epiphanic revelation), related to the
notion of mask and indirection, was probably the most important out-
come of French symbolism for Mansfield. It implies, from her perspec-
tive, a certain form of illumination or revelation, marked by emotion.
This is, according to her, essential to a work of art, as it gives it unity:
“there must be an initial emotion felt by the writer, and all that he sees
is saturated in that emotional quality. It alone can give incidence and
sequence, character and background, a close and intimate unity” (Mans-
field, 1920a: 68). This quotation reveals two important notions derived
from the symbolists: the organic unity of the work of art, i.e. the need
to eliminate all that is accessory, redundant and non-essential to the
planned design (also central in the definition of the short story), and
that of art as an activity that establishes its own ends and aims. Mans-
field believed that a work of art should not be a copy of reality, but the
expression of a subjective truth, resulting from vision, imagination and
the artist’s emotion (in “The Escape” all the details in most of the text
are constructed to emphasize the woman’s complaining and impatient
profile and to contrast it with the man’s silence and absence). These
concepts, which assume a search for deeper meanings, remind us of
the Woolfian image of the pattern behind the cotton wool. In Symons,
Mansfield found, as she did in Oscar Wilde, the sacralization of the art-
ists’ powers, the transformation of art into a kind of religion.
The psychological “sketch”, which became known in the 1890s
through, for example, periodicals such as The Yellow Book, almost cer-
tainly influenced Mansfield in her earliest attempts at the short story
form. In this type of text, techniques such as the flashback, the day-
dream and interior monologue were often used to convey the intimate
feelings and the characters’ experiences, in order to highlight their inner
life.
Walter Pater was also one of Mansfield’s early reading experiences:
“I should like to write a life much in the style of Walter Pater’s Child

87
in the House. […] a story – no, it would be a sketch, hardly that, more
a psychological study […] I should fill it with climatic disturbance”
(Mansfield, 1952: 37–38). In fact, some of the ‘vignettes’ that Mansfield
published in the Australian periodical, The Native Companion in 1907,
clearly evoke Pater’s rhythm and vocabulary.
Other authors marked Mansfield in her grasp of the “moment” –
Keats, Conrad, Joyce and, of course, Virginia Woolf, with whom she
had a competitive literary friendship. Keats, to whom Mansfield has
sometimes been compared, was, just like her, gifted with the quality
of the “Chamelon Poet”, that is, of becoming, or identifying with the
innermost essence of a situation. Mansfield writes about this aspect of
herself: “When I pass the apple stalls I cannot help stopping and staring
until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple, and that, at any
moment, I can produce an apple” (Mansfield, 1984b: 330). This ability
is a result of the intensity with which both lived life, of being aware
of the nearness of death. Mansfield, like Keats, felt that only through
the “Imagination”, attracted by the power of “Beauty”, can “Truth” be
obtained, that everyday objective occurrences and experience may be
the source of the most unexpected discoveries. The short story “Miss
Brill” (1920) shows this capacity of the author to impersonate a charac-
ter and a situation.
In July 1920 Mansfield published a review of Conrad’s The Rescue
in the Athenaeum; here, she exalts Conrad’s ability to bring novelty,
his sensibility to life and his valuing of the moment: “his passionate
insistence upon the importance of extracting from the moment every
drop of life that it contains” (Mansfield, 1920b: 65–66). One of the most
interesting similarities between both writers is their treatment of time.
Conrad frequently uses techniques such as the flashback, juxtapositions
between past and present, which explain events without discourse, the
reflexive summary in which a character jumps in time, and the repeated
reference to a character or episode over several pages of text, in order to
clarify a narrative position.
Mansfield cherished artistic seriousness, crossing the boundaries
of art/life which led her to an absolute dedication to her craft and to an
intense search for truth in her own self or “multiplicity of selves”. She

88
wished to be “clear as crystal” (Mansfield, 1952: 271), to “defeat the per-
sonal” (Mansfield, 1952: 195), in order to make her writing more objec-
tive. The notion of a mask, “impersonation” and “role-playing” is allied
to the modernist tendency towards multiplicity and fragmentation, and
reveals, by contrast, a need to attain through it, the unity of the essential
self, the true character. In a letter to Sylvia Payne, Mansfield writes:
“Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small –
but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many
people” (Mansfield, 1984b: 19).
Memory is, according to the writer, one of the most central ele-
ments of the artistic process, as emphasised before her by Wordsworth,
Bergson and Proust. Here, memory is not prized insofar as it relates
the present to the past, but more as a way of visualizing moments and
objects which can be literarily used. With the passage of time, the stored
images change and memory is transformed through isolating the most
important aspects of a certain event, evaluating and assessing received
impressions, synthesizing, juxtaposing and recomposing images and
scenes – all fundamental to the artist’s craft.
The epiphanic moment relates to many of Mansfield’s aesthetic
ideals: the presentation of an intense experience through a trivial acci-
dent; using ordinary experiences to find new psychological trends,
emphasizing emotion and intensity; the unexpected disclosure of another
level of the consciousness of a multiple self; the use of memory; the
ambiguous tone resulting from the epiphanic experience; the indirec-
tion determined by the change of direction of the character’s emotions;
the discovery of harmony and dissonance; and finally the revelation,
that after all, a snail can appear under a leaf or a spot appear in a child’s
lung.
Mansfield’s short story “The Escape” illustrates her use of this tech-
nique and its effects in the narrative structure of her epiphanic stories.
These are usually developed around a revelation moment that brings a
discovery and also the crisis it generates, thus becoming a core of conver-
gence and conflict of different impulses, of positive and negative forces,
supported by symbolism, by the presentation of different points of view
of the characters in free indirect speech, by thematic juxtaposition and

89
by irony. “The Escape” was published in The Athenaeum in July 1920,
and is included in the author’s final writing phase. Hanson considers it
the most modernist and one of the most symbolic of Mansfield’s stories
(Hanson, 1980: 43). The subject of the story, which begins in media
res, centres on the opposition and conflict between a couple, and the
ecstasy/alienation from reality of one of them. It can be associated with
other stories on a similar subject and written in the same period, such as
“Je Ne Parle Pas Français”, “The Man Without a Temperament”, “Mar-
riage ala Mode”, “Mr and Mrs Dove” and “Revelations”.
The text starts with a flashback (paragraphs one and two), in which
the reader learns of events preceding the opening few paragraphs. The
narrative voice – that of the female character – in free indirect speech,
immediately presents the reader with what will be the main tone of the
relationship between the couple – aggressiveness and accusations on
the woman’s side:
It was his fault and solely his fault that they had missed the train. […] Any other
man would have sat there and refused to move until they handed it over. […] ‘If
she’d been a driver she couldn’t have stopped smiling herself at the absurd, ridicu-
lous way he was urged to hurry’. (Mansfield, 1984a: 347–353)5

In this paragraph a sign/symbol is introduced – the parasol. The nar-

rator’s voice appears at the end of the paragraph, describing the wom-
an’s moaning, the imitation of the husband’s voice and of the way he
addresses the driver: ‘“Oh’, she groaned […] And she sat back and imi-
tated his voice: ‘Allez, vite, vite’ – and begged the driver’s pardon for
troubling him…” (346). This first paragraph alerts us to the notion of
change, the desire to escape reality and the inability to do so, and the
resulting consequences of this inaction – the woman strongly wants to
be set free, but at the same time she refuses to take responsibility for
any decisions: “Had he expected her to go outside, to stand under the
awning in the heat and point with her parasol?” (346) She systemati-
cally blames others: her husband in the first place and the hotel waiters’

5 Mansfield, 1984a. All page references to this story are taken from this volume and
follow directly after each quotation.

90
incompetence; these are, in fact, adjuvant (Hamon, 1977) characters
of the male character, reflecting his psychological faults. The woman’s
interpretation of events (real or imagined), allows her to “escape” into
the role of victim, where she feels safer, though less comfortable.
Free indirect speech in the second paragraph is interrupted by two
sentences in reported speech; the last of them introduces the woman’s
voice and signals the beginning of the narrator’s voice, reporting the
action. The second paragraph gives us an important clue to the woman’s
character, which will be developed later – her dislike of children: “hide­
ous children”, “baby with that awful, awful head” (347).
Details regarding the woman’s voice and her weeping are presented
by the anonymous narrator, whose own voice will be heard throughout
the third paragraph and at the beginning of the fourth, briefly introduc-
ing a new point of view – the husband’s. It is he who looks at the objects
in his wife’s open bag and thinks of Egyptian funerals, a thought which
defines the man’s indifference towards the woman. From this moment
on, the anonymous narrator takes up the story and his/her voice will
only be interrupted towards the end, when the epiphanic moment is
realised.
The entire first sequence, up to the moment when the woman asks
the driver to stop (349), presents a gradual succession of actions, which
consolidates the oppositional relationship between the couple and the
escalating anger of the wife: the husband suggests opening the parasol/
the wife aggressively refuses the idea; the verbs used in the descrip-
tion reveal this anger – “she blazed”; “she flashed”; “she tossed into it
the crumpled hood behind and subsided, panting” (347); the husband
takes an interest in the children/the woman disapproves of him; here,
the author contrasts the image of the small children offering flowers
with the woman’s attitude and her outburst: “‘Horrid little monkeys!
[…] you would encourage beggars; and she hurled the bunch out of the
carriage.’” (348); the husband tries to smoke/the woman forbids him;
once more the woman’s body language reveals her nervousness – “She
clasped her hands […] her nostrils quivered […] her head shook with
a little nervous spasm” (348); the husband offers to get the parasol/ the

91
woman refuses his offer – “And she bent her spiteful, smiling eyes upon
him […] ‘I’ll go myself’” (349).
The parasol, a symbol of the couple’s tensions, is one of the most
important objects in the story, which the woman refuses to brandish
to give directions for the disposal of the luggage, showing the reader
the first contact between the couple, and which will ultimately enable
the woman’s escape and lead to the man’s epiphanic moment. The par-
asol is a symbol of the sky, used throughout Asia as a sign of royalty
– a halo for the person it shelters, emphasizing his/her authority and
dignity. Here it has a double meaning: it stresses, as do the veil and
the rice powder, both the woman’s refinement and superficiality – “‘I’m
far, far too exhausted to hold up a parasol […] My parasol. It’s gone.
The parasol that belonged to my mother. The parasol that I prize more
than – more than …’” (349) – and at the same time it opens the way for
the husband to communicate with a superior world: “But so great was
his heavenly happiness” (350), a communication reinforced through
the tree. The initial image of the woman, directing the disposal of the
luggage with the parasol, suggests her desire for domination but also
reveals her inability to set herself free from the role she plays.
The raising of the veil marks the opening of an action and the
beginning of the inconveniences suffered by the woman. This object,
together with the parasol and the rice powder, also presents an element
of coquetry. It illustrates the ambiguity of the woman’s situation, which
alternates between a traditional position, “imploring behind her veil”
(348), and a more daring one, lifting the veil and opening the bag: “She
put up her veil […] The little bag with its shiny, silvery jaws open”
(347). Children and flowers are used to stress the woman’s insensibility
and egotism. The cigarette case, the only object traditionally belonging
to the male universe, is immediately put away.
The second sequence conveys the aggravation of the woman’s irri-
tation and introduces the notion of escape: “‘If I don’t escape from you
for a minute I shall go mad’” (349). The title, therefore, has a double
meaning: the woman escapes by standing back physically/externally;
the man will escape by withdrawing spiritually/internally. Both escape
from the disagreeable situation they find themselves in, by using different

92
means of denying both the relationship and their own personalities –
the woman becomes courteous, the husband stops feeling withered and
made of ashes – and subsequently the woman accepts or pretends to
accept the husband’s indifference and the husband is removed from the
wife. Perhaps each character’s escape, which paradoxically starts when
a train is missed, is the only way to achieve the coexistence of some
kind of happiness: “‘Oh, but my husband is never so happy as when he
is travelling […] But so great was his heavenly happiness as he stood
there he wished he might live for ever” (350).
The details presented are consciously planned to work as objective
correlatives of abstract states of mind or feelings. Consequently, the
character of the wife presents narcissism, egotism, aggressiveness and
a morbid sensibility, reflected in the handling of the bag and the rice
powder, the act of throwing away the flowers, the act of wiping away her
tears as if addressing herself (347), and finally in remembering the chil-
dren on the train as “hideous” and the baby as having an “awful, awful
head” (347). The husband portrays silence and indifference, reflected in
the swift putting away of the cigarette case. The increase in the intensity
of the wind – “the wind came, blowing stronger” (348) underlines the
approach of a crisis.
The third sequence presents the epiphanic revelation. In the final
part, the narrator’s voice fuses with that of the character – “He felt him-
self, lying there, a hollow man, a parched, withered man, as it were of
ashes” (349), and described in detail in free indirect speech:
There was something beyond the tree – a whiteness, a softness, an opaque mass,
half hidden – with delicate pillars. […] What was happening to him? […] Some-
thing dark, something unbearable and dreadful pushed in his bosom, and like a
great weed it floated, rocked …. it was warm, stifling. He tried to struggle to tear
at it, and at the same moment – all was over. Deep, deep, he sank into the silence,
staring at the tree and waiting for the voice that came floating, falling, until he felt
himself enfolded. (350)

The symbol is, no doubt, the best transmitter of the epiphanic moment’s
complexity. Here, the first image to suggest evolution is that of travel-
ling. And now, as revealed above, the epiphanic moment is character-
ized through vague words, which, analysed symbolically, refer us to a

93
kind of semi-conscious trance: “float” (four times), “light”, “sombre”,
“whiteness”, “softness”, “silence”, “warm”, “stifling”. The tree, the
central object of the revelation, is a rich element, its symbolic mean-
ings connected with the idea of a living cosmos in perpetual regenera-
tion, emphasising the cyclic character of cosmic evolution – death and
renewal. The configuration of the tree (similar to that of an open para-
sol), reflects another important meaning – the relationship between the
earth and the sky – “It seemed to grow, it seemed to expand […] until
the great carved leaves hid the sky” (349–350).
White represents as much the absence of colours as their sum, and
is connected as much with the place of departure as with the point of
arrival of daily life. It is the colour of the person who is going to change
his/her condition, a limit value connected with entering another state; it
is the privileged colour of the rituals through which death and renewal
changes operate.
Darkness may symbolize the absence of light – chaos – the notion
of something unutterable, not accessible to normal sight. Silence is
also a prelude to revelation, linked to great events, marking a progress.
These meanings emphasize the importance of the image of the tree at a
moment of apprehension/revelation of the beauty of life, the passage to
a new level of awareness or rebirth after cinders – “He felt himself […]
as it were, of ashes” (349). But the epiphanic moment also marks the
opposition that permeates the text: “light/sombre”; “whiteness/dark”;
“woman’s voice/silence”; “softness, part of the silence/peace shattered,
unbearable, dreadful”; “as the voice rose/the voice that came falling”;
“he felt his breathing die away and he became part of the silence/some-
thing stirred in his breast. Something dark, something unbearable and
dreadful pushed in his bosom […] it was warm, stifling” (350).
The vision of the tree offers the man two types of reaction: the
sensation of being part of the silence in which a seductive woman’s
voice sings – “he felt himself enfolded” (350), and the sensation of dis-
tress, suffocation and oppression as the voice rises and addresses him –
“Suddenly, as the voice rose […] he knew that it would come floating
to him […] and his peace was shattered” (350). The description of the

94
epiphanic moment is used to emphasize the man’s sensitivity, further
underlined by the final sequence.
The brief last section, composed of eleven lines (350), which
appears unexpectedly, is composed of three short paragraphs: the
first describes the man’s attitude and draws attention to the darkness
(“night”, “dark”), which symbolically connects to the unconscious;
in the second, the woman’s conversation with different interlocutors is
presented, referring in a tolerant but hypocritical tone to the husband’s
satisfaction when travelling and complaining of her nerves; the third
paragraph contrasts the murmur of voices with the happiness (“heav-
enly happiness”) of the man who wants to “live for ever” (350) .
The basic structure of the story is grounded in duality. This duality
develops through the opposition between the characters, progressing
gradually to the final parallel – the physical escape of the woman /the
internal escape of the man and the maintaining of the relationship by
both, in an atmosphere of relative tranquillity. This duality is made real
through the man’s epiphany, defining a contrast between reality and
appearance. The woman´s tranquillity and her references to the hus-
band are only part of the superficial social veneer; the man’s escape
from reality is always conducted in silence. The parallel is only exter-
nal, because the woman has not undergone a true epiphany.
The epiphany is positive in this instance, since it leads the char-
acter who undergoes it to peacefulness, and a state of calm happiness.
However, it does not release him from a stifling relationship which he
does not dare to end, and this does not change the line of evolution of
the plot on the level of external actions. The conflict of the relationship
is, therefore, not settled because the woman does not take any initia-
tive; that is to say, the truth of the relationship lies in the irony of the
impossibility of escaping. Our perception of the moment’s significance
is emphasized beyond its meaning and consequences. The epiphanic
moment is a polarizing and amplifying element of the conflict/duality
on the thematic level – the ambivalent nature of personality and the
revelation of the contradictions of the self, the conflicting relation, the
need for contact with the Other and the perpetuation of a meaningless
relationship, the longing for freedom and the attachment to security and

95
routine; and on the formal level – the narrator hides behind the charac-
ters presenting the disagreeing thoughts of each, in free indirect speech.
The final ironic intonation questions what seemed clear – the char-
acters’ profiles, the narrative development and the resulting epiphany.
They stress the discordant meanings of the text, which are, after all,
centres of creativity in many modernist works. K. Mansfield’s use of
epiphany in many of her stories to stress the constraints, frustration and
absurd of the revealed situations, places her in the centre of stylistic
innovation in what concerns this formal and thematic device, and the
development of the short story genre.
The place, the tree that the protagonist sees casually inside a garden
gate, is not separated from his consciousness of it (“he was conscious
of its presence just inside the garden gate” [349]). Reality is also emo-
tional reality, and space is formed in the relationship this specific place
has, in the character’s experience, with other places presented before.
Time builds the relationship between them. The attempt to fuse the
inner ego and the outer world, as also happened in text 1, is character-
istic of an impressionist and modernist aesthetics, also affected by the
social and material changes felt along the second half of the nineteenth
century, by all the dynamics of modern life, and the new concern with
topography and geography. Space is thus implied in short fiction theory
and narratology through the suitability of the use of spatial form in a
brief narrative.

References

Beja, Morris (1971). Epiphany in the Modern Novel. London: Owen.

Bidney, Martin (1997). Patterns of Epiphany – from Wordsworth to Tol-
stoi, Pater and Barrett Browning. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
UP.
Current-Garcia and Walton Patrick, eds. (1974). What is the Short
Story? Illinois: Scott.

96
Dowling, David (1976). ‘Katherine Mansfield: her Theory and Practice
of Fiction’. PhD diss. University of Toronto.
Dunbar, Pamela (1997). Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s
Short Stories. London: Macmillan.
Ferguson, Suzanne (1982). “Defining the Short Story: Impressionism
and Form”. Modern Fiction Studies, 28.1: 13–24.
Fullbrook, Kate (1986). Katherine Mansfield. Bloomington: Indiana
UP.
Hamon, Philippe (1977). “Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage”.
Rev. version. In Barthes et al., Poétique du récit. Paris: Seuil. 115–
180.
Hanson, Clare (1980). “The Aesthetic of Katherine Mansfield”. PhD
diss. University of Reading.
Hanson, (1985). Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980. Hong
Kong: Macmillan Press.
Hanson, Clare (1987). “Introduction”. The Critical Writings of Kather-
ine Mansfield. New York: St. Martin’s.
Hanson, Clare and Andrew Gurr (1981). Katherine Mansfield. London:
Macmillan.
Kaplan, Sydney Janet (1991). Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of
Modernist Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Kobler, J. F. (1990). Katherine Mansfield – a Study of the Short Fiction.
Boston: Twayne.
Mansfield, Katherine (1920a). “Review of a reissue of Esther Waters by
George Moore”. In The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield.
Ed. Clare Hanson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. 66–69.
Mansfield, K. (1920b). “Review of The Rescue by Joseph Conrad”. In
The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Clare Hanson.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. 65–66.
Mansfield, K. (1952). The Journal of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. by John
Middleton Murry. London: Constable.
Mansfield, K. (1984a). The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Antony
Alpers. Auckland: Oxford UP.

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Mansfield, K. (1984b). The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield.
Vol. 1. Ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Nichols, Ashton (1987). The Poetics of Epiphany – Nineteenth Century
Origins of the Modern Literary Moment. Tuscaloosa: U. of Ala-
bama Press.
Rohrberger, Mary (2004). “Origin, Development, Substance and Design
of the Short Story”. In Per Winther, Jakob Lothe and Hans Skei
(eds). The Art of Brevity – Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and
Analysis. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. 1–13.
Tigges, Wim, ed. (1999) Moments of Moment – Aspects of Literary
Epiphany. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Van Gunsteren, Julia (1990). Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impres-
sionism. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Wilson, Janet, Kimber, Gerri and Reid, Susan, eds. (2011). Katherine
Mansfield and Literary Modernism – Historicizing Modernism.
London: Continuum.
Zinman, Toby (1973). “The Snail under the Leaf: Katherine Mansfield’s
Ironic Vision”. PhD diss. Temple University.

98
Part II
5.  Regionalism in the Portuguese Short Story1

The affirmation of the short story as a literary genre in the modernist

period, which in Europe and America occurred mainly between the final
quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth,
did not happen in Portugal2. The only writer of early modernism who is
really innovative in the few short stories he wrote, as he brings to nar-
rative his experience as a painter and poet, is José de Almada-Negrei-
ros3. But this does not mean that the short story was absent, right from
the middle of the century. In the pioneering study O Conto Regional
na Imprensa Periódica de 1875 a 1930 Costa Lopes (1990) devotes
three chapters to the description of the periodical press in towns and
in the provinces. She centres her attention on the literary periodicals
and magazines, women’s periodicals, regionalist and ethnographic
ones. This categorization is, of course, artificial, because, in most cases,
the periodicals include literary, regional and other types of subjects.
In Serpa, for instance, a small village in the Alentejo, A Tradição, a
monthly illustrated magazine of Portuguese ethnography, was published
between 1899 and 1904. Its main intent was the listing and study of
Portuguese habits and traditions in different regions, mainly Alentejo.
It included articles about religious festivities, short stories, legends,
songs, proverbs, texts about the rural life, work and the space in which
people lived. Authors such as Teófilo Braga, Alberto Pimentel or Trin-
dade Coelho, among others, show their concern with the renewal of
the native country’s ancient principles.4 At the same time, the literary

1 A previous version of this text was published in the book of hommage ‘A scholar
for all seasons’ – homenagem a João de Almeida Flor. Ed. J. Carlos Viana Fer-
reira et al. Lisbon: CEAUL/DEA/FLUL, 2013. 103–116.
2 On this general issue see Hanson, 1985 and Ferguson, 1989.
3 On this see Pereiro, 1996 and Silva, 1996.
4 On this see the bibliography Rafael and Santos, 2001; Pires, 1986 and Tengar-
rinha, 1965 and 2013.
magazines published in the towns looked for new models, which were
mainly the French at two particular moments – 1870 with Realism and
1889 with Symbolism.
In England, the growth of regional fiction was closely tied to the
expansion of the reading public in the late nineteenth century. The
demand for fiction increased in connection with improved levels of lit-
eracy and the transformations in the publishing industry5. In Portugal,
the periodical press also played a very important role in the develop-
ment of the Portuguese short story mainly with regionalist narratives,
very popular from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The prov-
ince or region emerged from oblivion to which it had been consigned,
when their traditions and uses were reproduced in periodical publica-
tions. The first collections of popular tales were brought together during
this period (end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twen-
tieth century) by the first Portuguese folklorists: Adolfo Coelho, Con-
siglieri Pedroso, Teófilo Braga, J. Leite de Vasconcelos (Lopes, 1990,
v.1: 6). But what contributed, I believe, to the affirmation of the short
story during Presença’s later modernism and after that, was the reason-
able bulk of regionalist short fiction produced between 1870 to 1930. It
is framed by two main opposing tendencies, often present in this type
of fiction: the rejection, on the one hand, of the influence of foreign
models, which conceives of the region as a lost paradise whose charac-
teristics it is important not to loose and the inevitable framing, on the
other, by European and American interest in regionalism, undoubtedly
connected with the emergence of political nationalisms. Thomas Hardy
in England and Bret Harte in America are two very famous examples.
Besides this, regionalist literature comprises a paradox in itself as it
constantly discusses the prevalence of the particular over the universal
and vice versa, a question already debated by Homer and Shakespeare6.
It tries to value a culture for being intact but it offers outsiders the
chance to enjoy its life. In Portugal, as in other countries, the interplay

5 On this see Snell, 1998.

6 On this see Wimsatt Jr, 1947.

102
of political atmosphere, cultural and psychological forces gave specific
meanings to this problem.
But the dialectic between globalization and localism – without
provinces and provincialism there can be no identity and without iden-
tity there is no nation and state – is not the only ambivalence of region-
alist literature. Another concern is the question of why the genre and
its various forms have been so neglected in disciplinary and critical
study; in many critical studies of the novel, there is no mention of the
regional novel. H. Auster says, in a critical tone, about British regional-
ism: “regionalism in English fiction, as distinct from American, when
regarded at all, is normally regarded as something of a curiosity, and a
curiosity of no significance. Enduring literature, it is said, is universal:
only second rate writers are regional” (Auster apud Snell 1998: 14).
Willis Knapp Jones, twenty years before, convinced of the uselessness
of using the regionalist tag on a novelist, wrote in his article “Regional-
ism: advantage or handicap?” that “in many cases the region is only the
extra, the frosting on the cake, which can easily become cloying if too
thick […] [and] if the novel is inept and uninteresting, then regionalism,
no matter how thickly applied, can never make it great” (Jones, 1953:
428).
One of the reasons for the reassessment of regionalism nowadays,
apart from its relations with post-colonialism, cultural issues, globaliza-
tion and localism, historical and political questions, is the reconsidera-
tion of space as an analytical category. Francesco Loriggio defends that
Lotman’s notion of ‘world picture’
reasserts the narrative primacy of space and region […]; if the semantic field is a
‘world picture’ and is configured spatially, if the establishing of location is indi-
rectly (rules) or directly (when the story is given distinctly topographical or geo-
graphical coordinates) the preliminary narrative gesture, one does not merely fill
in the background (or the setting, the landscape, etc). Description is not an embel-
lishment, an ornament, an adjunct to narration; it is, on the contrary, the condition
of its possibility. Without it there can be none of the other features which go with
stories qua stories. […] This amounts to saying that regionalist writing becomes
the prototype par excellence of that narrative mode. (Loriggio, 1994: 3; 13–14)

103
Loriggio writes that secular regionalism, as it is considered in critical
discourse, emerged in coincidence with the rise of the modern nation-
State and nationalism, the idea of national literature, realism and the
consolidation of European imperialist expansionism. But its history
developed through modernity into post colonialism and cultural hybrid-
ism, which has increasingly been the normal condition of communi-
ties, individuals and literatures. Now “places are de-territorialized and
reclaimed to other sorts of territory” (Idem: 4), the interdependence
between the former colonial countries and the recently independent is
clear, and the languages appear in many sub combinations according to
the location of the speakers. Nowadays, geographical space as a histor-
ical and political inscription embodies more and more ambivalences.
Moreover, the relation between fact and fiction varies considerably
in regional fiction between authors and between the different literary
movements, the cultural and social frames of the narratives. The recon-
sideration of regionalism is, therefore, also connected with the undenia-
ble expansion of the genre as a whole since the World War II and during
the later 1970s and 1980s in Great Britain and many other countries.
This includes “the burgeoning of a variety of ‘black’ and ‘ethnic’ writ-
ing since 1945” (Snell, 1998: 31) which may be centred upon particular
urban areas or varied cultural backgrounds and traditions such as the
West Indian, Asian, Chinese, African and so on.
In Portuguese literature, the generation of the first half of the nine-
teenth century is dominated by a certain patriotism inspired by tradition
and national history. Romantic writers such as Alexandre Herculano and
Almeida Garrett, influenced by European Romanticism and by internal
political conflicts (the economic independence of Brazil, the French
invasions, the social and economic crisis, the 1820 liberal revolution
and the reaction of the absolutists, the approval of the first Portuguese
constitution in 1822, the loss of privileges for Church members and the
nobility) follow the romantic model and try to bring to the fore some
of the most important national subjects: the land, the people, legends,
customs and traditions (Lopes, 1990).
Almeida Garrett in Viagens na Minha Terra, published in serial
form from, 1843, focuses for the first time on a definite region – the

104
Ribatejo and some of its most interesting and characteristic features.
The work is conceived as the chronicle of a journey to Santarém, the
capital of the Ribatejo, during which the author gives evidence of what
he sees, hears, thinks and feels: “I am travelling to Santarém, no less:
and I protest that as much as I see, hear, think and feel, will be testified
to in a chronicle” [Vou nada menos que a Santarém: e protesto que de
quanto vir e ouvir, de quanto eu pensar e sentir se há-de fazer crónica]
(Garrett, 1977: 15)7. Published as a novel in 1846, it is a hybrid work,
full of literary, historical, artistic, ethnographic, political, and philolog-
ical digressions and rambling thoughts, sometimes dispersed, but main-
taining a very close relation with the reader, through colloquialism and
sentence rhythm. Garrett appears to use the model of Sterne’s Senti-
mental Journey (1787) or of Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma Chambre
(1794), and intersects the references to literary European tradition and
culture (referring to autors such as Maistre, Byron, Ovid, Cervantes,
Victor Hugo, Dante, Goethe, among others), with the detailed descrip-
tion of the gentleness of a meadow in a Ribatejan plain:
The valley of Santarém is one of those places privileged by nature, mild and
delightful, in which plants, the air, its location, everything is in perfect and very
gentle harmony: there is nothing sublime or imposing there, but there is a kind of
symmetry in colours, sounds, disposition in everything you see and feel, that it
cannot but seem that peace, health, quietude of spirit and repose of the heart must
live there, that a kingdom of love and goodwill rules there.
[O Vale de Santarém é um destes lugares privilegiados pela natureza, sítios
amenos e deleitosos em que as plantas, o ar, a situação, tudo está numa harmonia
suavíssima e perfeita: não há ali nada grandioso nem sublime, mas há uma como
simetria de cores, de sons, de disposição de tudo quanto se vê e se sente, que não
parece senão que a paz, a saúde, o sossego do espírito e o repouso do coração
devem viver ali, reinar ali um reinado de amor e benevolência.] (Ibid: 68)

Alexandre Herculano’s novel O Pároco de Aldeia published in 1844

in the periodical O Panorama (and in 1851 in the double short story
volume Legends and Narratives [Lendas e Narrativas]) anticipates the
regionalist short story, with its candid and optimistic vision of rural

7 All translations of this article are mine.

105
life and defence of religious emotions. The author tries to show that
“religion is an affective need and that Catholicism with its festivities,
images, miracles and saints can, more than Protestantism, correspond to
that need” (Saraiva/Lopes, s.d.: 741). The text is full of digressions but
maintains Herculano’s characteristic tendency to realism which is here
softened by the kindness of the Priest. This is also the first generation
of writers who introduces the lower classes in literature. In both books
there are no characters drawn from the nobility and in both the relation
with the reader is close. O Pároco de Aldeia is not constructed for any
reader as would happen with later regionalist short stories. There are
digressions about Catholicism and Protestantism, church bells, Byron,
Homer, Horace and many others, whose biographies Herculano sum-
marizes in footnotes throughout the text. It is interesting to draw atten-
tion to the years 1853 and 1854, during which this author and foremost
historian, travelled around the country to gather old documents for the
volumes Portugaliae Monumenta Historica, a collection of historical
documents which would enable historical investigation. Herculano
wrote about this in his eight volume History of Portugal – “It is shame-
ful that Portugal has not associated itself to the great historical impetus
given by Germany to the whole of Europe, by such a core of serious and
deep knowledge” [ “é na verdade vergonhoso que Portugal se não tenha
associado ainda ao grande impulso histórico dado pela Alemanha, por
esse foco de saber grave e profundo, a toda a Europa”] (Herculano, n-d:
23–24). In these expeditions, paid for by the State, in which Herculano
was accompanied by a paleographer of the Torre do Tombo National
Archive, he also made extensive notes about what he was seeing, which
were published later. What stood out for the historian in these excur-
sions was the decadence of the country, a consequence of the excess of
political centralization. But for him, the solution would be to place the
local populations, wherever they were, in key positions, giving them
the chance to define their own objectives, according to their values and
characteristics. This would inevitably bring the improvement of their
living standards, but to achieve it, it would be necessary to reinforce the
municipal institutions. On the other hand, Herculano considers agricul-
ture the foremost industry and says that the ground and the cultivated

106
fields are the most important monuments of the modern spirit8. But
the fact is that in Portugal the technical transformations that changed
the peasants’ lives throughout the nineteenth century developed very
slowly. The Regeneration, the historical period between 1851 and 1870
brought roads, bridges, the railways and the beginning of industrializa-
tion, but in spite of this, traditional activities still engaged most of the
population.
The first regionalist short stories, clearly written under the influ-
ence of these two authors were Rodrigo Paganino’s Os Contos do Tio
Joaquim (1861), which has had many editions to this day and Júlio
Dinis’ Serões na Província (1870). The first is, as said in the text, clearly
influenced by Émile Souvestre (Au Coin du Feu) and Lamartine. It is
a collection of short stories, told by the same narrator, a peasant who
relates to his fellows, stories from his former experience. Both Paganino
and Dinis base their work on light sentimentality and Christian moral-
ity, although Dinis’ style is certainly more refined. About the death of
Paganino, whom he very much admired, Dinis wrote:
In my opinion, with him disappeared one of the most promising and talented pop-
ular novelists of our country; when I read Paganino’s book I seem to find in it
precisely everything that critics looked for in vain, in others. That was really a
book written for the people and for children.
[A meu ver desapareceu com ele um dos mais prometedores talentos de roman-
cista popular que têm surgido entre nós […] ora quando eu li o livro de Paganino
pareceu-me encontrar nele justamente tudo o que debalde os críticos procuravam
nos outros. Aquele sim era um livro verdadeiramente escrito para o povo e para as
crianças.] (Dinis, 1964: 181–182)

8 “What is then, the monument that better sumarizes this regeneration period? Is it
the appearance of the ground, the magnificence of the fields […] Clear some acres
of land; in a mark, carve the date of that transformation: cover Portugal’s surface
with these marks. There you have, not one but a thousand monuments that stand
for the spirit of the present”. [“Qual será, portanto, o monumento que melhor
resuma este período de regeneração? Será o aspecto do solo, o viço dos campos
[…] Arroteai algumas jeiras de terra; em um marco esculpi a data dessa transfor-
mação: cobri a superfície de Portugal destes marcos. Eis aí, não um, porém mil
monumentos que significarão o espírito do presente”.] (Herculano, 1898:8–9)

107
Serões na Província, besides its importance in the evolution of region-
alist short fiction, is not a short-story volume but is composed by novel-
las of a length of 50 to 120 pages. It is, nevertheless, Dinis who, for
the first time in Portuguese literature integrates the characters in the
atmosphere he is describing, making them work as only one piece. He
was influenced by the British and the French realist traditions, namely
by authors such as Richardson, Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Dickens and
Balzac but he sees the novel as a “mainly popular type of literature”,
which should reflect the essential goodness of human nature and where
the readers could see “the reflexion of themselves” (Saraiva/Lopes, s.d:
806). In a way, he illustrates a compromise between the ideal of moral-
izing through the rural simplicity and emphasizing the rise of the bour-
geoisie, whether coming from a rural origin or from the city. Apart from
some criticism of the regime, the ideology behind Dinis’ narratives
conveys a belief in universal harmony, stability and progress, based on
liberalism. His regionalist affiliation is, consequently, limited to a cer-
tain point of view:
This scene took place in a Sunday evening in the square where the younger part
of the population gathered to dance, laugh, sing and talk about love; and to pray,
sleep and talk about the past and the other’s lives, the other part of the population,
with more years and less careless joy. From this place, situated in the crossing
of the four main ways which crossed the village, one could see, from the west
side, a long sequence of meadows and fields, divided in quarters, regular as the
flowerbeds of a garden, through long rows of poplars that the vines, involving the
branches, furnished with pendents and big garlands.
[Esta cena passava-se na tarde de um domingo e no largo onde se reunia para
dançar, rir, cantar e falar de amores, a parte jovem da população; e para rezar,
dormir e falar do passado e das vidas alheias, a outra porção mais favorecida de
anos e menos de descuidosa alegria.
Deste lugar, situado na encruzilhada dos quatro principais caminhos que atraves-
savam a aldeia, estendia-se a vista, do lado ocidental, numa série extensa de
várzeas e de campinas divididas em quarteirões, regulares como os tabuleiros de
um jardim, por longas fileiras de choupos, que as vides, enleando-se-lhes nos
ramos, guarneciam com pendentes e vistosos festões.] (Dinis, 1916: 247)

As António José Saraiva writes in his História da Literatura Portuguesa

about memorialistic literature and travel writing, “the valuation of the

108
picturesque, of the experienced anecdote, of the personal testimony, of
biography and autobiography goes, hand in hand, in Europe, with the
development of scientific observation, naturalist taxonomy, journalism
and the dignification of bourgeois life” (Saraiva/Lopes, s.d: 811). This
ambivalence, which assumes the disapproval of a futile life and the
need for a communion with nature, through the interest in the regional,
matured, in Portugal, only with the 70 generation. This literary group
was interested in analysing with the aim of telling the absolute truth,
criticizing human beings, painting them before themselves, to know
and condemn what is wrong in society (Queirós, 1871: 55–56). Realism
sought to liberate literature from an idealized past which was used as
an evasion from the problems of the present. The people’s customs were
important to show a human reality affected by decadent social struc-
tures. The influence of Europe was very important for men like Antero
de Quental, Eça de Queirós and Teófilo Braga who, through their read-
ing followed European social development (the Paris Commune, the
attack on the Papacy), its anthropological and biological idea of evo-
lution, the European questioning attitudes towards religious belief and
Christianity and the philosophical Germanic thinking (Hegel and Feuer-
bach). Apparently unaware of the national circumstances in which they
were involved in, these men ran counter to Portuguese society, and this
is clearly shown in the Casino Lisbonense Democratic Conferences, a
cycle of conferences trying to draw Portuguese attention to the intellec-
tual problems of their time. The conflict is clear in the reaction to the
text Palavras Loucas, published in 1894 by Alberto de Oliveira, con-
sidered the first theorizer of regionalist literature in Portugal. Love of
the mother country and of tradition are central subjects in this book, to
such an extent that six of the most important writers of the time sent him
letters discussing the topic (Lopes, 1990). Eça de Queirós considered
that the development of traditionalist themes would not bring the moral
and mental renovation of the country; he considered these efforts insig-
nificant and underlined the importance of an intellectual opening up to
other realities: “Not all of humanity is to be found between the banks
of the river Minho and the Cape of Santa Maria – and a thinking person
cannot decently spend his life murmuring ecstatically that the banks of

109
the Mondego are beautiful!” [“A humanidade não está toda metida entre
a margem do rio Minho e o Cabo de Santa Maria: – e um ser pensante
não pode decentemente passar a existência a murmurar extaticamente
que as margens do Mondego são bellas!”] (Oliveira, 1925: 24–25).
Guerra Junqueiro draws Oliveira’s attention to the narrowness and bar-
renness of “national art” considering it an “illusion”, something “infe-
rior” as it is made of “elegies” and “sarcasms”. He also stresses that the
regional work of art should belong, at the same time, to a province and
to the whole world (Idem: 31–32). Reality cannot be framed. The same
dual tendency is present in the critical monthly periodical As Farpas.
It was started in 1871 by Eça de Queirós and Ramalho Ortigão, but
maintained only by the later, alone, for sixteen years. Ramalho’s conser-
vatism transformed what was initially a chronicle for critiquing society,
religion, politics, literature and public opinion into a regionalist descrip-
tion of ideal old customs and places, evoking folklore, the intense and
other times dying picturesqueness, of some neighbourhoods. Although
we are not dealing with narrative, these short prose texts foreshadow the
fiction of the most important regionalist generation, the traditionalist
1890. Here is a quote on Régua in Douro:
Dazzling! Under the balcony, facing north, spreads in a gentle slope, a large patch
of short vines, thick, dense, in every shade of green, from the brightest to the
darkest, tinged by the mature Autumn hues in amber and flame smudges, fair, red,
ash-coloured. Below, the Douro river, sprawling in an enormous S all along the
valley, shining between plots of olive groves and orchards.
[Um deslumbramento!
Debaixo da varanda, voltada ao norte, estende-se em doce declive um largo talhão
de vinha baixa, cerrada, espessa, em todos os tons do verde, desde o mais vivo
ao mais escuro, rajado das tintas maduras do Outono em manchas cor de âmbar
e cor de fogo, louras, vermelhas, calcinadas. Em baixo, o rio Douro, espraiado,
descreve um enorme S em toda a extensão do vale, reluzindo entre rasgões de
olivedos e de pomares.] (Ortigão, 1987: 63)

By the end of the century, many writers returned to rural subjects,

trying to defend national principles and to reject foreign models such
as the French, used in periodicals as Os Dois Mundos, O Occidente, A
Ilustração ou Branco e Negro through translations, or to defend from

110
political threats such as the British Ultimatum. This brought the desire
to vindicate national honour and to fight for the integrity of Portuguese
property; patriotism, nationalism and the regaining of old traditions are
also a writer’s task; that is what Alfredo da Cunha and Trindade Coelho
have in mind when they advise writers in 1893 “to go to the provinces of
our country to find health and strength for the weaknesses of the spirit”
(Cunha/Coelho, 1893: 1), to rebel against foreign impositions, to follow
the national models in vocabulary, language and diction and to explore
every aspect of popular literature:
We desire, as a consequence, that at least in literature and art, a firm opposition
against foreign impositions is started and the subversion clamour is set up, dig-
nified and high, against any exotic hegemonies; and that, in parallel, the past is
respected, more in facts than in words, which is being denied so far; the past where
our purest glories come from and where we find justification and reason for our
pride […] We will explore popular literature without forgetting high literature,
from the different lyrical, religious and political song-books to the different kinds
of slang, the riddles and children stories, the plays and carols, all those insignifi-
cant things that our writers have not paid attention to, so far.
[Aspiramos, por conseguinte, a que, na literatura e na arte, ao menos, se inicie
uma tenaz rebeldia contra imposições estranhas, e se levante, nobre e alto, o grito
de subversão contra quaisquer hegemonias exóticas; e que, paralelamente, se
preste ao passado, d’onde dimanam as nossas mais puras glórias, e onde achamos
justificação e desculpa para todos os nossos desvanecimentos, o respeito que,
talvez mais por factos do que por palavras, se lhe está quotidianamente negando.
[…] Sem desprezarmos a alta literatura, exploraremos a literatura popular, desde
os diferentes cancioneiros lírico, religioso e político, até aos calões de diversas
espécies, as adivinhas e os contos infantis, os autos e as lôas, todas essas mínimas
cousas de que até hoje raro têm curado os pretores das nossas letras.] (Ibid: 1–2)

Trindade Coelho repeats the same ideas in his article “Tradition”,

included in one of the numbers of the periodical Educação Nacional
(Coelho, 1899)9. He is, no doubt, one of the two most characteristic
writers of the genre, with his short story volume Os Meus Amores

9 “We must love our traditons very much, our family traditions and our country tra-
ditions. To love our traditions is to love the customs and traditions of our country,
to love the character of our country, that is, its way of thinking, feeling and behav-
ing”. [“Devemos amar muito as nossas tradições, tanto as da família como as da

111
(1891). The atmosphere depicted by Trindade Coelho is also part of
political ideals. Country life and traditional customs are treasured to
an absurd degree, as happens with the approval of hard work or insuf-
ficient food. It is still developed along the beginning of the twentieth
century with the ultraconservative political movement Integralismo
Lusitano, started in 1914, which defended the conservative attachment
to the land, the country and the race, the tradition and anti-progressive
politics and also monarchy, through the voices of Hipólito Raposo and
António Sardinha.
The other is Fialho de Almeida, whose literary reputation is based
exclusively on the short story; the rural space is, along with the urban
working and middle class space, one of the most explored in his narra-
tives, mainly the provinces of Beira and the Alentejo, in the volume O
País das Uvas (1893). Human drama is here shown with sensitiveness
and realism, on a par with the beauty and innocence of country life.
Fialho’s regionalism, far from Coelho’s encloses an opposition in that
he considers the beauty of the village, always from a distant perspective
but the evidence of its ugliness, lack of charm and faults when we are
inside it:
If we observe it from a distance, with its small white houses, grouped around the
church with the two old steeples, through a gap in the mountains, by a brook that
snakes its way around the fringes of old willows, with its mossy bridge […] we
lack a pallet inspired by the Arts Academy […] When we enter it, the poetry that
lulled our illusions, the sigh that we were going to breathe, the ideal we evoked
before, everything dies, flees to give way to a yawn.
[Se a observamos de longe com as suas casinhas brancas, agrupadas em torno da
igreja de dois campanários antigos, por uma aberta das serras, junto de um regato
que serpeia por entre as orlas de velhos salgueiros, com a sua ponte musgosa […]
carecemos de uma palheta não bafejada pela Academia das Belas Artes […]
Em nós lá penetrando, a poesia que nos embalava as ilusões, o suspiro que íamos
soltar, a idealidade que evocávamos antes, tudo morre, foge tudo, para dar lugar
ao bocejo.] (Almeida, 1879)

pátria. Amar as nossas tradições, é amar os usos e costumes da nossa terra, é amar
o caracter da nossa terra, isto é, o seu modo de pensar, de sentir e de proceder”.]

112
In this process, Fialho shows that some of the charming motifs of pasto-
ral life are, in fact, an indication of lack of progress. One of them is the
plough, whose evocation of the biblical atmosphere conflicts with the
agricultural processes used at the time in France, Great Britain or Amer-
ica. Álvaro J. da Costa Pimpão, in his seminal critical text about Fialho
de Almeida, writes that his regionalism is “a complex psychological
case […] a sheer drama between the ideal aspirations of a romantic
and aesthete and the painful reactions of sensibility, when it brushes
against the common or tawdry realities” [“um caso psicológico com-
plexo […] um puro drama entre as aspirações ideais de um romântico
e de um esteta e as reacções dolorosas da sensibilidade, ao roçar pelas
realidades mesquinhas ou vulgares”] (Pimpão, 1946: XX). This com-
plexity may be a result of the influences of his readings in French and
English literature (besides the Portuguese, of course). He read Proud-
hon, Renan, Taine, Flaubert, Zola, Paul Bourget, probably Gogol and
Dostoievski and he was also interested in the gothic narrative of Horace
Walpole, Anne Radcliffe and E.A. Poe. Together with a strong region-
alist sensitiveness, developing from naturalism to decadentism, Fialho
is concerned with the race and defends eugenic measures to deal with
it; he cherishes aesthetic sensibility as a result of a refined lineage and
that is why he considers the native of Alentejo the “worst plague of the
region” (Fialho apud Pimpão: XI), after the lack of water, because of
its want of beauty and hygiene. This blend of elements is present, for
example in the short story “Tragédia na Árvore”, in which he speaks
about the animals of his garden:
The nightingales sing mainly during the night, in the moonlight, when the other
birds sleep in a bourgeois manner, with their heads under their wings. It is then
that their voice gains pathetic accents, melodies nuanced by passion, impetuosi-
ties, whims, entreaties. Nobody has yet rhymed with more heart-breaking lyricism
the poem of melancholy. To understand them you must be poor, talented and have
suffered. They give heaven’s nostalgia, those Savoyards, whose voice staunches
the soul’s sufferings, and whose existence makes you think, because of the mys-
tery in which it is enveloped. Imprisoned, they die of sadness.
[Cantam sobretudo de noite os rouxinóis, fazendo lua, quando as mais aves
dormem burguesamente, com as cabeças debaixo da asa. É então que a voz lhes
ganha acentos patéticos, melodias nuançadas de paixão, veemências, caprichos,

113
 súplicas. Ninguém rimou ainda com mais cruciante lirismo o poema da melanco-
lia. Para entendê-los é necessário ser pobre, ter talento e ter sofrido. Dão a nostal-
gia do céu, esses saboianos cuja voz estanca as dores da alma, e cuja existência
faz cismar, pelo mistério de que se enubla. Encarcerados, morrem de tristeza.]
(Almeida, 1946: 140)

The critical studies on Portuguese regionalist literature reveal different

approaches. Some of them simply underline the importance of concen-
trating in old communities and old traditions, others analyse its lan-
guage and themes, others study authors and specific works, others try
to discuss its characteristics and evaluate its literary quality. A good
example is the debate between Ferreira de Castro and José Dias Sancho
in 1925. Ferreira de Castro argues that the artistic aim of the work of
art cannot be achieved with regionalist literature because the regionalist
writer addresses only those who speak a specific idiom; if the major
duty of the artist is to scan the soul of the universe and to confine it in
the desires and feelings of his characters, it is irrelevant whether these
characters are Portuguese or Russian. If the regionalists were not able
to create universal characters with a universal soul, they have betrayed
their artistic mission. He also argues that some writers who show the
picturesqueness or the exoticism of different parts of the world are not
real artists, they only make notes for those who are not able to travel.
Here internationalism should not be confused with tourism. He is con-
cerned with progress when he states that if the twentieth century soul
is more turbulent and inconsistent, literature should follow it. Reject-
ing progress and wanting to live the spirit of the past makes no sense
(Castro, 1925: 1–2)10. In his Cultures of Letters, about reading and writ-
ing in nineteenth century America, Richard Brodhead considers that
regionalist fiction is an especially instructive instance to understand
the history of literary opportunity in the country, serving as the prin-
cipal place of literary access for writers in the postbellum decades, as
many of them succeeded in establishing themselves as such, through
this form. According to Brodhead, regionalism, still conventionalized
in traditional formulas, did not require highly elaborate writing skills

10 On this see also numbers 98 and 101 of the same periodical and Sancho, 1925.

114
but only familiarity with some cultural backwater (Brodhead, 1993:
115–117). Drawing the reader’s attention to the mid nineteenth century
domestic periodicals, he says that “the great staple of these journals is
the short piece of touristic or vacationistic prose, the piece that under-
takes to locate some little known place far away and make it visitable
in print” (Ibid: 125). In Portugal, regionalism was a place of literary
access for very few writers but it was, above all, a place of literary
promotion of the short story. More than the touristic side of prose, what
was in the minds of the writers was, under the influence of the French
Regional geography school, the need to show an economic, social, his-
toric, cultural, sentimental way of experiencing the reality of the differ-
ent regions.
Two of the writers who owe their literary reputation mainly to
short story publication in periodicals of this period are Teixeira de Que-
irós (1849–1919) and Raúl Brandão (1867–1930). Queirós published
eight volumes of short stories, a work entitled Comédia do Campo,
and is considered the best nineteenth century novelist after Eça; Raúl
Brandão, a distinguished prose writer whose prose defies all the preju-
dices towards regionalist conventionality, is one of the few who wrote
about the coastal life and people. As an Introduction to a group of sto-
ries, in a text entitled “História do batel ‘Vai com Deus’ e da sua Com-
panha”, Brandão records the absence of fiction about the sea:
Since Portugal is a coastal country, a land lulled by the ocean, very few works in
our literature deal with the sea and the fishermen. Why? In the first place deco-
rum is formidable but monotonous; then, the men are certainly full of poetry but
humble. The life of the poor, rough, obscure, painful is like the life of the land we
tread on, large, ignored, simple and without screams. […] And what a scenery this
is, the Sea! My one hope is that these documents may be useful for someone in
time to write the formidable work the subject deserves.
[Sendo Portugal um país de costa, terra que o oceano embala, raras são na nossa
literatura as obras que tratam do mar e dos seus homens, os pescadores. Porquê?
Em primeiro lugar o decoro é formidável – mas monótono; depois os homens
são, é certo, cheios de poesia – mas humildes. A vida dos pobres, rude, obscura,
dolorosa, é como a vida da terra que calcamos, grande, ignorada, simples e sem
gritos. […] E que cenário este, o Mar! […] Que estes documentos possam servir
para alguém mais tarde fazer a obra formidável que o assunto merece, é a minha
única pretensão.] (Brandão, 1901: 13–14)

115
This observation raises up the issue of the connection between this type
of literature, anthropology and cultural knowledge. Ambivalence comes
again to our mind: when you turn another culture in to an object of
knowledge, you subordinate it to a frame of reference, you have author-
ity over it in a certain way; but this dominance of the observer should
also be questioned and relativized; he should question his most basic
assumptions to contemplate the other. Fialho de Almeida is an excellent
example of this difficulty. Aquilino Ribeiro (1885–1963), on the con-
trary, believes that writers should be faithful to the reality they observe,
maintaining it primitive, unaltered, even limiting their own language
if necessary. With the same perspective, Hardy tried, in the Preface to
Wessex Tales, to explain to his readers that human memory is imperfect
and unwittingly formalizes the fresh originality of living fact (Hardy,
1991). Either way, the production of regionalist short stories was a
definitive step in the growth of the genre, and gave way to Presença’s
rural short story (Miguel Torga and Branquinho da Fonseca – cf. text 7)
and to neorealist short fiction (Alves Redol and Manuel da Fonseca-
cf. text 8).
The recognition of the important role of regionalism in the devel-
opment of the short story is part of the renovated interest for the field
nowadays, in turn related with the interdisciplinary nature of the area,
its diversity and political relevance, issues of nationalism, centralism,
with the meaning of the concepts of community, identity and even
ecology. These topics, intersected with the present-day development of
short fiction, the flexibility and hybridism of the form, reveal a vast area
of investigation to travel through. In Portugal, regionalist short fiction
swayed between the firm rejection of foreign models, with Trindade
Coelho, for example, and the unavoidable application of those models
in their relation to national questions. In a different scale, cultural, social
and political frames were decisive, as in other countries, to the structure
of regional narratives, the choice of themes and building of characters.
Júlio Dinis and Raúl Brandão attest it. The romantic/sentimental atmos-
pheres of the short stories of the 1870s and 1880s are slowly changed
into naturalist/realist ones, which will culminate with the neorealism of
the 1940s. The titles of the volumes testify this transformation: Contos

116
ao Luar (1861), Cenas da Minha Terra (1862), À Lareira (1872) by
Júlio César Machado, Contos ao Soalheiro (1876) by Augusto Sar-
mento, Serões de Inverno (1880) by Pedro Ivo, Ilusão na Morte (1938)
by Afonso Ribeiro, Contos Sombrios (1938) by Alexandre Cabral.
On the other hand, the strong interference of oral tradition and folklore,
the use of implicit or explicit morality, still visible in the first stage of
the production of regional short fiction, will slowly disappear along the
first half of the twentieth century, to reveal more and more the pursuit
of aesthetic aims either in subjects or style – the short story reveals a
strong tendency to literariness or the literarization of the form. It won,
with the help of regional space, its own place in the hierarchy of genres.

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6. The City Manquée or Nostalgia for
Another Place

The self-affirmation of literary short prose or the short story as a liter-

ary genre in the modernist phase, which in Europe and in the United
States developed mainly between the last quarter of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth century was not so clear in
Portugal1. The most innovative writer of this period, though producing
very little in the genre, is José de Almada Negreiros, who brings his
experience as painter and poet to narrative2. But this does not mean that
the short story was absent as a literary form with other characteristics,
after the middle of the nineteenth century. Lopes (1990) writes three
chapters about the periodical press in the cities and in the countryside.
She focuses on literary periodicals and magazines, on periodicals for
women, on the regionalist and ethnographic periodicals, though this
categorization is artificial because, in most of the cases, these include
articles on multiple subjects, among which literary and regional ones.
Authors such as Teófilo Braga, Alberto Pimentel or Trindade Coelho,
among others, reveal their interest in renewing native and traditional
values, which results either in an absurd conservatism or in a national-
ism and patriotism whose main lines will be resumed by the previously
mentioned ultraconservative political movement of Integralismo Lusi-
tano, started in 1914 with Hipólito Raposo and António Sardinha. At the
same time, the literary periodicals published in the cities looked for new
models, mainly of French origin, at two specific moments – 1870 with
realism and 1899 with symbolism. The interest in fiction was, in other
countries, directly related to literacy levels and the technical evolution
of the publishing industry; in Portugal, though on a much lower scale

1 See Hanson, 1985; Ferguson, 1989, and Lohafer, 1983.

2 See Pereiro, 1996 and Silva, 1996.
if compared with, for example, Britain, the development of periodicals3
also played a determining role in the development of the short story,
mainly regionalist, very popular from the 1870s onwards. As referred
in the Introduction (cf. pp 14–19), the outbreak of literary short story is
associated, in many countries, with classical modernism; and classical
modernism converged, in its first decades, in cities. In Portugal, during
this period, the discussion of city spaces in short prose is less frequent
than the discussion of regional spaces4.
The complexity of the city as a physical, spatial structure produces
more elaborate forms of understanding it; industrialization brings,
beyond other transformations, a diverse urban crowd, an “Other” that
sees him/herself both as an outsider and included in the new structure;
for the modernist subjectivity, the results of that revolution, mainly after
the second phase of the process (1840–95), transform the city into a
hostile, materialistic, alien space, problematizing it far beyond its urban
identity. However, modernist art also has a specific relationship with
the city, since its most important tendencies were born and rooted in
the European capitals, as centers of cultural exchange, spaces where
tradition endures but where, at the same time, novelties and specialists
build up, and innovation is more likely (Bradbury/ McFarlane, 1986).
This relationship also lies in other, different factors that develop in par-
allel – the explosion of urbanization, the recognition of the author and
the feeling of crisis, the relativization of value and artistic expression.
After the eighteen eighties, globalization and the growth of multicultur-
alism inside the megacity bring a kind of territorial, social and cultural
redefinition. This symbiosis between city and culture is “more and more
evident in the cultural studies that see the city space as the most signif-
icant text for the artists and culture producers today and indicate the
many possibilities of the immense lab in which the city space has been
transformed, faced as public sphere and cultural arena” (Gomes, 1999:
22). How is the city space characterized in some of the Portuguese short

3 See the bibliography of Santos, 2001; Pires, 1986 and Tengarrinha, 1965.
4 For a study of the identification of places in Lisbon mentioned in fictional narra-
tives from 1852–2012, see Queiroz and Alves, 2012.

122
narratives that raise this literary form? How does the modernist city,
represented in Joyce’s “Two Gallants” and Woolf´s “Mrs. Dalloway in
Bond Street” contrast it? The four Portuguese authors chosen exem-
plify two types of short fiction and two thematic moments: the realist-
naturalist, criticizing the decadent city (Eça de Queiroz [1845–1900]
and Fialho de Almeida [1857–1911]) and the modernist, exploring the
perception of this decadence through states of mind, visual writing or
the writer’s considerations (Almada Negreiros [1893–1970] and Irene
Lisboa [1892–1958]). This reflection on the sign of the city focuses on
the notion of Lisbon as city manquée, provincial, confronting it briefly
with the image of Dublin and London. Three different perspectives
will be taken into consideration: Lisbon as a shadow of other cities,
for example, Paris; the urban world and its rural frontiers or the trans-
position of the regional to the urban; the representation of dullness and
paralysis in the city.

In Lisbon… dreaming of Paris

In the text “Lisbon” from Prosas Bárbaras (1903), published in Gazeta

de Portugal, 13 October 1967, Eça de Queiroz (2001) presents the
image of a decadent, sleepy and apathetic city, contrasting it with
Paris, London, New York, Berlin, among others. In these cities “one
suffers because one thinks”5 [“sofre-se porque se pensa”] there is soul
and heart. Lisbon “buries ideas” [“enterra ideias”], “it does not have to
sow”, “it snores in the sun” [ “não tem que semear, ressona ao sol”], “it
eats in the late afternoon” [“come ao cair da tarde”], “it does not create
or start, it goes” [“não cria nem inicia, vai“], “it does not have the cour-
age that dedicates itself nor the sobbing fear” [“não tem a coragem que
se dedica nem o medo soluçante”], “it has neither the fever of specula-
tions and industries nor the love of contemplations and dreams: it has

5 All translations of this text are mine.

123
work full of siestas” [“não tem a febre das especulações e das indústrias
nem o amor das contemplações e dos sonhos: tem um trabalho cheio
de sestas”]; at night it welcomes Vice, during the day “life is slow”
[“a vida é lenta”], “scarce” [“escassa”], dirt; Lisbon that “adores the
mud” [“adora a lama”], produced fado while “Athens produced sculp-
ture, Rome created law, Paris invented revolution and Germany mysti-
cism” [“Atenas produziu a escultura, Roma fez o direito, Paris inven-
tou a revolução e a Alemanha achou o misticismo”]; Lisbon “sleeps,
digests, snores, sobs and smokes its pipe” [“dorme, digere, ressona,
soluça e cachimba”], accepting the absence of a soul (Queiroz, 2001:
183–193). It is, above all, the image of a city without courage, without
characters, which “does not want to create, think, be an apostle, criti-
cise; it only listens and applauds” [“não quer criar, pensar, apostolar,
criticar; escuta e aplaude, apenas”]. The target of Eça’s critique is not
the physical town but above all, the human town and its limitations; the
images he uses to relate Lisbon to nature show these limitations: “it has
neither to build the cathedral of ideas nor to compose the symphony of
the soul, which is why it listens to the blackbirds in the lowlands” [“não
tem de construir a catedral de ideias, nem de compor a sinfonia da alma,
por isso escuta os melros nas várzeas”] (Queiroz, 2001: 183–193). In
another article titled “O Francesismo”, published posthumously, in
which he regrets the exaggerated role of French culture in Portugal over
others, namely the English, Eça reveals his disenchanted thinking about
the relationship of the cities with the countryside:
Deep down, a country is always a very small thing: it is made up of a group of
literati, statesmen, business men and club men, who attend the center of the cap-
ital. The remainder is landscape that is hardly different from the shape of villages
or valleys. It is the sleepy country people, who barely differ from the short, dirty
winding lanes where they vegetate; it is the country people who are barely distin-
guishable from the swarthy land they sow and water. Their single social function
is to work, to pay. The direction of a country is defined precisely by this minority
in the capital. When some journalist and some Paris politician wants France to be
republican, a republic is proclaimed; when he prefers a monarchy, there ascends
someone with a crown on his head. To the throne of Louis XIV. It is neither the
Beauce peasant nor the Orleans bourgeois who chooses the red cap or the closed
crown.

124
 [Um país, no fundo é sempre uma coisa muito pequena: compõe-se de um grupo
de homens de letras, homens de Estado, homens de negócio e homens de clube,
que vivem de frequentar o centro da capital. O resto é paisagem, que mal se dis-
tingue da configuração das vilas ou dos vales. É a gente sonolenta da província,
que apenas se diferencia das pequenas vielas tortuosas e sujas onde vegeta; são
os homens do campo que mal se destacam das terras trigueiras que semeiam e
regam. A sua única função social é trabalhar, pagar. A direcção de um país é dada
justamente por essa minoria da capital. Quando algum jornalista e algum político
de Paris quiser que a França seja republicana, proclama-se a república; quando
preferir que haja monarquia, sobe um sujeito, com uma coroa na cabeça. Ao trono
de Luís XIV. Não são os camponeses da Beauce, nem os burgueses de Orleães
que escolhem para a França o barrete vermelho ou a coroa fechada.] (Queiroz,
2003: 253)

Eça’s critique (more explicit and narratively defined in the novels)

addresses the politicians, the parties, the power of the city as center of a
decadent and corrupt cultural and political life, that after all shares with
the great urban centers the withdrawal between the city elites and the
country people. Space is a social product (Lefebvre, 1991) and the land-
scape mentioned by Eça includes both human and material elements.
On the other hand, his novels witness a very suggestive physical geog-
raphy6, not used in most of the short stories, apart from “A Catástrofe”
and “José Matias”. The issue of city/countryside, which implies the city
space although it is not objectively mentioned, is dealt with in the short
stories “Civilisation” and “Um dia de chuva”.
The other critic of the decadent city is Fialho de Almeida. He is also
one of the most important Portuguese short story writers on this themat-
ics. Still influenced by the line of social and human reform defended
by the realist generation, Fialho represents the city as one of the poles
of analysis of a society in a decadent process that can drown individu-
als and take them to social degeneration and moral misery. The other
pole, equally destructive, but through primitivism, is the countryside, to
which Fialho dedicated a substantial part of his work.
The city is, thus, used as a cultural atmosphere, framing a focus of
moral and physical infection. Its effects are revealed in the characters’

6 See Dias, 2003.

125
journeys, always more explored from the social point of view than from
the individual. Their physical and psychological portraits show it as in
the short story “A Condessa”:
It was in that week that I saw her at the São Carlos [Opera house], still full of a
provincial gaucherie, true, but bringing a strong desire to study and throwing men
glances like a sickle blow, sparkling, ellipsoid, that were immediately successful.
From that moment on she was launched and her path was strewn with camellias
and her body was girded with glittering jewelry.
[Foi já nessa semana que eu a vi em S. Carlos, ainda cheia de uma gaucherie
provinciana, era certo, porém trazendo muita vontade de estudar, e deitando aos
homens uns olhares em golpe de alfange, faiscantes, elipsóides, que logo tiveram
sucesso. Desde então estava lançada, e atapetavam-lhe o caminho de camélias e
cingiam-lhe o corpo de ourivesarias cintilantes.] (Almeida, 1994: 82)

The presentation of this horizontal profile of the character portrayals

is developed in the background of the description of city impressions
and scenes; a city painted with objectivity, where the combination of
places and situations brings individuals, particularly women, to ruining
and negative tendencies. To show this effect, Fialho chooses places such
as theatre dressing-rooms and circuses, hospital wards, the brothel,
the tavern, the cemeteries, the rooms of rich bourgeois women or even
the street. He criticizes the clergy, the constitutional aristocracy, the
monarchy, government employees, republicanism. The city that Fialho
describes, reveals the degeneration of civilization, as much that of the
countryside; in both, poverty and moral decadence are present. How-
ever, from his short stories (and chronicles), two kinds of city emerge:
one real, lived, that is poor, degraded, mediocre, dingy, moronic and
nocturnal; another one dreamt and idealized from contact with the great
European capitals (“The Avenue, you know, is the most wonderful thor-
oughfare of all Europe” [“A Avenida, já sabem, é a mais admirável pas-
sagem de toda a Europa”] [Almeida, 1904: 86]) or in the urban, social-
izing and architectural projects (Almeida, 1920).
Fialho also captures the city/countryside relationship, showing
undifferentiated moments in the creation of frontiers, or the effect of each
of them on the other. In “A Condessa” (Almeida, 1994:77–78), Laura
leaves her hamlet, to which she will come back, to serve as housemaid

126
in the city that will spoil her; in “O Roubo” (Almeida, 1882), the Chelas
old man’s wife, “the old countrywoman in raw boots and yellow head
scarf ” [“a velha saloia de botas cruas e lenço amarelo”] visits him in the
ward on harvest day, after he has recollected his village:
Everything in that hospital was sad, smelling of the tomb – misery, catastrophes,
falls!… The soul trembled with cold. And also thoughtful, the Chellas old man,
raised his gaze to the landscape in front of him, alive with people and penetrated
by the thrills of the air and the sun, that mildly, mildly made the tops of the wheat
and the olive tree leaves ripple. At that time, everything would open in his poor
hamlet, corollas of morning laughter, simple and sincere as the soul of the green
meadows, transpiring in the birds’ singing and in the blue eventide mist. The
church bell would call to the festivity; people from farmhouses in groups, went
maybe into the old warhead gateway, gothic from the first dynasty, and in the
village piccolos and drums, would hearten the ball of the girls with millers, thick
as calves. From one side the river mirrored, and from the other green hills tingled
with flowering orchards, tall, leisurely water-mills and wind mills spinning […]
What would happen to the cows, the cabbage windrows, the potato field and the
donkey that had birthed!
[Tudo n’esse hospital era, pois, triste, cheirando a tumba — misérias, desgraças,
quedas! . Tremia a alma com frio. E também pensativo, o velho de Chelas, erguia
o olhar sobre a paisagem fronteira, viva de mundo e penetrada dos frémitos da
aura e do sol, que manso, mansinho, iam fazendo ondular os colmos das searas e
as folhitas das oliveiras. Aquela hora, tudo abriria no seu pobre lugarejo, corolas
de risos matinais, simples e sinceros como a alma dos prados verdes, exalada no
cântico dos pássaros e na bruma cérula do entardecer. Iria chamando à festa o
sino da igreja; gente de casais aos ranchos, entrava talvez o velho portal de ogiva,
gótico da primeira dinastia, e no arraial flautins e bombo, animariam o bailarico
de cachopas com moleiros, espessos como bezerros. D’uma banda o rio espe-
lhado, e da outra colinas verdes picadas de pomares em flor, altas noras ronceiras,
e moinhos de vento em rodopio […] Que seria das vacas, das leiras de repolho, do
batatal e da jumenta parida!] (Almeida, 1882: 75–76)

Costa (2004) explains Fialho’s ambivalence towards Lisbon showing

that, though he despises the worldly and mundane side of the city, he
dreams with a monumental and grandiose capital where “the modern
house,in the style of Paris […] adopting the new architectural models”
should be implemented [“a casa moderna pelo estilo de Paris […]
adoptar os modelos de arquitectura nova”] (Almeida, 1994: 16;17).

127
Lisbon: modernist intersections and observations in short
narrative prose

In a totally different tone, Almada Negreiros’s short prose, though only

comprising four narratives, reveals an avant-garde posture that hardly
has a parallel in this literary genre in the Portuguese literature of the
time. The novel “A Engomadeira” (1917) (Negreiros, 1993), the only
one of these texts whose narrative space is set in Lisbon, is introduced by
a letter, of 17th November 1917, addressed by Almada to José Pacheco,
explaining his intentions when he wrote this “commonplace Lisbon
novel” in which, to use the author’s words, he intersected unmistakable
aspects of Lisbon mischaracter and disorganisation; in this prefatory
letter, the painter underlines the importance of Paris and his ideological
affiliation to values, “the good aspects” of this city. Lisbon appears, as
Pereiro (1996)7 notes, as a physical space (through references to specific
places and streets such as “a Avenida, a Rotunda, o Rossio, o Terreiro
do Paço”, among others), as psychological space through the creation of
scenes (such as, for example, the demonstration a propos of the Allied
Nations, the barber’s shop, Sundays with Guarda Republicana musi-
cians, the day in August with everybody on the beaches, the boredom
felt in the country, the day of the Revolution that established the Repub-
lic, the elegant neighborhood of Estefânia, the cafés Martinho and Bra-
zileira) and as social space through the presentation of manners and
types such as Mr. Barbosa, or the fish sellers who walked the streets or
the ironing woman’s mother. The city is used on two different levels: it
is, on the one hand, the starting point to construct a critical and humor-
ous discourse about Lisbon life, that includes its characteristic types
and atmospheres, the revelation of the triviality of political debates and
“the bourgeoisie’s false aspirations to culture” [“falsas aspirações à cul-
tura por parte da burguesia”] (Sapega, 1992: 49); it is on the other, a
space that will be more and more mischaracterised [“o descarácter” –
mischaracter], and fragmented, turning into mental space, together with

7 See especially Chapter II on the epochal connotations of the Lisbon imaginary.

128
the “progressive dismantling of characters as we see the removal of the
many layers of which they are made up” (Sapega, 1992: 48–49). This
process of dismantling is revealed through the transformations of the
narrative voice, that starts in the omniscient third person and will end
in an autobiographical “I” (before the final chapter, again in the third
person) through a route that will become more fanciful and surrealistic
(allusion to the keys), more satirical and centered in the narrator, more
directed to internal reflexivity, up to the partial identification with the
author:
Maybe the reader does not know this but I am also known as a cartoonist […] I
understood the way a step can be a world if we want it to be and it is a real world
even if we do not. I even found two different worlds in the same nail, one was the
head of the nail, the rest was the other. What interested me most was exactly the
head of the nail. And then there was another world in another nail head […]. And
still more: I felt that each pore of my body, each isolated molecule, was a series of
different worlds […] Ah! The very interesting worlds which are in their thousands
in metal tones […] and in all the sensations of the mineral soul.
[Talvez o leitor não saiba mas eu também sou conhecido como caricaturista […]
compreendi como um degrau pode ser um mundo se nós quisermos e é um mundo
real mesmo que nós o não queiramos. Achei mesmo dois mundos diferentes dentro
dum mesmo prego, uma era a cabeça do prego, o resto era o outro. O que me inter-
essou mais foi justamente o que era apenas a cabeça do prego. E logo havia outro
mundo noutra cabeça de prego. […] E mais ainda: eu sentia que cada poro do meu
corpo, cada molécula isolada, era uma série de mundos diferentes […] Ah! Os
mundos interessantíssimos que são aos milhares nos timbres dos metais […] e em
todas as sensações da alma mineral.] (Negreiros, 1993: 81;87)

In the end we lose sight of the ironing woman (just referred to as

the narrator’s mistress), the figure of Mr. Barbosa is explained, and
the reader can no longer find logic in the initial characters’ actions,
finding himself/herself in the three last chapters of the novel before
“a discourse that swings between three vertices: the traces of a plau-
sible plot, pure fancy and the exposition of a philosophy of art and
life” (Sapega, 1992: 54). The initial world from which the text had
started – the city – has been transformed into another narrative uni-
verse, through the intersection (simultaneity) of different realities:
the external events and the interior world of the characters, reality

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and fantasy, the ironing woman and the narrator, the dwarf and the
narrator. Here, the still failed city as in Eça and Fialho – the flâneur
hat scrutinises it – is employed by the author, more to build and
propose an aesthetics of modernity than to critique its provincial
limitations. The critical observation of the city as a physical place
gives way to the presentation of the city as a state of mind, in which
the modernist self presents the city landscape through a subjective
view, which reacts to external impressions; the ability to behold the
city objectively is slighter and this can render it dimmer and more
impenetrable.
Likewise, in Irene Lisboa, one of the short fiction and chronicle
writers of her generation who wrote more about the city, we find the
same mark of modernity but under a different shape; there is here a
greater distance between the internal gaze, the questioning of the “I”
who lives “pulling at the thread of ideas” [“puxando o fio às ideias”]
(Lisboa, 1997: 135) and an external world constantly observed; a
world where, as Paula Morão says “the lives that surround the writer
have the effect of an amplifying mirror in the narrator’s life, thus
placed in the axial position of someone who is part of a time and a
city” (Morão, 1995: 11). The author herself uses a discourse structure
that, in several moments of the narrative/chronicle/report, even admits
this: her interest in the act of observing, and telling as an exercise in
analysis:
I collect in this volume a few remarks on situations I knew about that I unraveled
and considered quietly […] I simply put them in round handwriting, I narrated
them. […] I narrate, I exercise analysing cases and creatures […] Unimportant
things suddenly become so very important! A few glances are enough, dissonant
or occasional, in a word, unpremeditated […] But what is the point of all this?
Due to a supposed appreciation of the banal, the commonplace, of what seems
unimportant: things and people. For example, “the woman who comes to the door
selling things.
[Recolho neste volume umas tantas observações sobre casos que conheci, que me
pus a desfiar e a reconsiderar tranquilamente […] Pu-los simplesmente em letra
redonda, contei-os. […] Conto, exercito-me a analisar os casos e as criaturas […]
As coisas sem importância revestem-se subitamente de uma tão grande importân-
cia! Bastam apenas uns pequenos golpes de vista, divergentes ou casuais, enfim,

130
 impremeditados. […] Mas a que vem tudo isto? A uma pretensa valorização do
banal, do irrisório, do que se nos afigura sem importância: coisas e pessoas. Por
exemplo «a mulher que vai à porta».] (Lisboa, 1995: 15–16 e 1997: 151)

This attitude is revealed in the frequency with which the narrator refers,
for example, to her window (“A Carroça”, “A Cabrilha”, “A Dívida”
(Lisboa, 1997) as an observation point. As a symbol of receptivity and
openness to air and light and as a consequence to the world, the window
creates a bridge between an outside and a psychological inside, in which
there is a self reflection through the tissue, the variety and the fluke
of contexts and situations, in which it is integrated. The city, the river,
are part of this situational context where, always centered on autobi-
ographical moments of drawing back on herself (such as for example in
“A Dívida”, “A Prima Isabel” and “Final” (Lisboa, 1997), Irene Lisboa
reveals her sensitivity to a great variety of city “types” (the shoemak-
ers, the sellers, the newspaper sellers, the domestic maids, the baker,
the fishwife, the cripple, the hillbillies, the poor, the intellectual, the
teachers, the hairdresser, the lazy private, the brushed clerk), faithfully
depicting a mosaic of the problematics of the period (for example, the
state schools in “Épocas” or the dirty and stigmatised poverty in Águas
Livres archways in “Naquele Domingo” (Lisboa, 1997) or explores the
city-province relationship using her own relation with the semi-rural
world of the Lisbon outskirts (“A Adelina, etc…” (Lisboa, 1995), “A
Enfermeira”, “Vida”, “O Presente dos Saloios”, “O Burrico” or “Lau-
rinda” [Lisboa, 1997]). Thus, the city breaks up into a diversified panel,
that is the corollary of the author’s observing concerns, the target of her
reflexive glance, through which a symbiosis is revealed: between an
undeveloped city background (that lives partly from the land or to which
the rural is transposed), and a gallery of rural types, who try to progress
in the city, wishing to return later, invariably, to the tranquility of their
homeland; in the city, “as in all big cities: Paris, London, Shanghai, Rio”
[“como em todas as grandes cidades: Paris, Londres, Xangai, Rio”]
Irene Lisboa points out “the spectacular poverty and the hidden poverty”
[“a miséria espectaculosa e miséria escondida”] (Lisboa, 1997: 70).
The barrenness and passivity, the eventual blankness that this city can at
times reveal, are cancelled by the narrator’s literary sensibility; she says

131
that the city’s blankness does not dull the senses because the human
machine has many resources and is always able to discover variety
(Lisboa, 1995: 109). The experienced and described city in the texts of
these two authors is still a city manquée. But it is also the city seen by
modernity, by a conscious gaze that creates an art object from its own
perception process. The writer steps into the city as a writer.

The city as a support for the characters

Dublin and London were also cities “narrated” by two of the most impor-
tant modernist short story writers, but in a very different form. Free, for
example, from the praising references to other more developed cities
and free from the relationship with the countryside. Dublin is also pre-
sented as a failed city, but as the performing area of texts whose narra-
tive voices try to bring forward particular situations; for example, in the
short story “Two Gallants” (1905–6), which belongs to the adolescence
group of stories in Dubliners (Joyce,1996), James Joyce describes in the
realist and symbolist mode that characterizes him, the aimless, sense-
less roaming of two youths through Dublin streets, through the detailed
and reliable enumeration of all the streets and corners of the completed
walk; the character’s frustration, abasement and “paralysis” are after-
wards amplified through the symbolism of the harp (a national symbol
in Ireland which is also used in the country’s currency) and of the gold
coin presented at the end, probably stolen from the girl whom one of the
main characters had arranged to meet. Lenehan’s thinking, after a pause
for a light meal, before resuming the constant “wandering” that will
take him to the arranged place with his friend, shows it:
He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts and
intrigues. He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job?
Would he never have a home of his own? […] He had walked the streets long
enough with friends and with girls. He knew what those friends were worth: he

132
 knew the girls too. Experience had embittered his heart against the world. But all
hope had not left him. (Joyce, 1996: 57–58)

Joyce wanted to show “the paralysis of the soul”, “a caricature of Dublin

life”, “to portray certain aspects of life in one of the European capitals”
(Joyce, 1996: 253–255); the city is therefore his central subject and he
characterises it through the profiles and life episodes of its inhabitants.
In the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923) (Woolf,
1991), planned as the first chapter of Mrs. Dalloway, with a similar
structure but not centred on the city as a subject, Virginia Woolf uses the
description of the character’s ride through London streets as an external
plan of action, from which or in parallel with which, many of Mrs Dallo-
way’s thoughts are triggered and her stream of consciousness, revealed,
mostly in free indirect speech. Here, more clearly than in Joyce’s short
story, the effect of each element of city life, from Big Ben’s chimes to
the lightness of the air or to the acquaintance whom the protagonist
comes across, everything is used to reveal thoughts, feelings, conflicts,
pressures, experiences, characteristics, observations, in a word, the soul
of the character. Everything is used to show the reader the social system
that Woolf would admit was her intention to critique, in the eponymous
novel. That is why the city that impresses Mrs. Dalloway, the part of
the city in which she quotes Shelley (“quoting Shelley in Picadilly” –
Woolf, 1991: 154), is one of the most elegant and expensive in the
London dating back to the eighteenth century:
Clarissa held herself upright for she had spoken aloud and now she was in Pica-
dilly, passing the house with slender green columns, and the balconies; passing
club Windows full of newspapers; passing old Lady Burdett-Coutts’ house where
the glazed white parrot used to hang; and Devonshire House; without its gilt leop-
ards. […] There was St. James Palace; like a child’s game with bricks; and now –
she had passed Bond Street – she was by Hatchard’s book shop. […] And there
was that absurd book, Soapey Sponge […] and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. She knew
them by heart. (Woolf, 1991: 154–155)

Modernist art indubitably has a very direct relationship with the city;
in it the possibilities of communication and the incommunicability, the
commercial, technological, industrial and intellectual development, the

133
exchange of persons and cultures, innovation, speed and fragmenta-
tion, the notion of crisis, multiplicity and contingency, subjectivity and
dehumanisation are a background that helps set many of the aesthetic
concepts of modernism. Just as there is a history of modernism con-
nected with each great city8 (Bradbury & MacFarlane, 1986), there is a
multiplicity of ways of looking at the city, defined by the city at which
you are looking, by the gaze of the artist and even by the genre in ques-
tion; multiplicity that can become antinomian when, as Timothy Oakes
defends (Oakes, 1997) the writer uses place and space as an atmosphere,
where he/she frames paradoxes of modernity and contradictions. Even
if it shares its nuclear quality of brevity with life in the modern city,
the Portuguese short story was not the form more deeply related to the
city. The image of Lisbon in the Portuguese short narratives that I have
mentioned, naturally testifies to a very different cultural positioning and
level of social and economic development from other European cities; it
is a space that is always beneath, a city manquée, partly failed, and this
is revealed in the nostalgic references to cultural, spreading cities, in the
innumerable references to a numb and monotonous routine, from which
innovation is absent and, above all, in the prevalence of themes where
the city is seen as a kind of mixed space, neither really urbanised, nor
rural. Even so, that city was used by writers such as Almada Negreiros
or Irene Lisboa to build a discourse of great aesthetic modernity.

8 Bradbury and McFarlane analyse this aesthetic movement in Berlin, Vienna,

Prague, Chicago, New York, Paris and London.

134
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Almeida, José Valentim Fialho de (1882). “O Roubo”. In A Cidade do

Vício. Porto: Chardron. 59–92.
Almeida, José Valentim Fialho de (1920). “Lisboa Monumental”. In
Barbear, Pentear (Jornal dum Vagabundo). Lisboa: Livraria Clás-
sica. 87–144 (1st ed: 1911).
Almeida, José Valentim Fialho de (1904). Pasquinadas (Jornal d’um vag-
abundo). Porto: Chardron, available in <https://archive.org/stream/
pasquinadasjorna00almeuoft/pasquinadasjorna00almeuoft_djvu.
tx>t (1st ed: 1890).
Almeida, José Valentim Fialho de (1994). Lisboa Galante- episódios e
aspectos da cidade. Lisboa: Veja (1st ed: 1890).
Bradbury, M, and McFarlane, James, eds. (1986). Modernism – 1890–
1930, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Costa, Lucília Verdelho (2004). Fialho de Almeida – um decadente em
revolta. Lisboa: Frenesi.
Dias, Marina Tavares (2003). A Lisboa de Eça de Queiroz. Lisboa: Qui-
mera.
Ferguson, Suzanne (1989). “The Rise of the short story in the Hierar-
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Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Bâton Rouge and London: Louisiana
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Gomes, Renato Cordeiro (1999). “A cidade, a literatura e os estudos
culturais”. Ipotesi: revista de estudos literários, v. 3, n.º 2: 19–30.
Hanson, Clare (1985). Short Stories and Short Fictions. London: Mac-
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Joyce, James (1996). “Two Gallants”. In Dubliners- text and criticism.
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Joyce, James (1996). Dubliners- text and criticism. Eds. Robert Schol-
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Lisboa, Irene (1997). O Pouco e o Muito – Crónica Urbana. Lisboa: Ed.
Presença (1st ed: 1956).
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Lopes, Ana Maria Costa (1990). O Conto Regional na Imprensa Periód-
ica de 1875 a 1930, 2 vols. Lisboa: Univ Católica.
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Sapega, Ellen (1992). Ficções Modernistas: um estudo da obra em
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7. Narrative Frames: Fialho de Almeida,
Branquinho da Fonseca, Mário Braga and João
de Araújo Correia – Landscape in Rural Space

1. Introduction

The short story, or more accurately short narrative prose, is by defi-

nition a picture that reveals and witnesses, important moments in the
cultural and social scenery of a certain age or period (Poe, 1847; May,
1984; Cortazar, 1974). Written representations of a landscape are sym-
bolic images that contribute to a better knowledge of the landscape they
describe, and may also change their meaning, by adding another level of
cultural representation to the initial space. Foucault points out that in all
cultures and civilizations there are real places, kinds of counter-places
where all the other places we find in culture are simultaneously repre-
sented, refuted and inverted, places that are out of all places – hetero-
topies (Foucault, 1967). From the literary criticism point of view, Hillis
Miller (1995) brings a fundamental contribution to this theme: he starts
with Heidegger’s phenomenology and his notions about the way the
work of art takes root in the ground and in the landscape (Miller, 1995),
to study the topographic description function in novels and poems and
to understand the function of topographic terms in philosophical critical
thinking. But before this, based on humanity’s gaze over its position on
the land from which it springs, but exploring in more detail the literary
rhetoric related to the idea of place, Leonard Lutwack (1984) had, in a
rather thorough way, already studied in The Role of Place in Literature
the physical characteristics of place (length, verticality, horizontality,
centrality, acentrality, place and process, place and things, atmosphere,
place and time, place and movement), as well as the relation of place
to other elements such as plot, character, literary genre, symbolic space
or the body. Later Bertrand Westphal, in his formulation of the method
of literary analysis he named Geocriticism, argues that one should find
a balance between the observed/represented space and the number and
variety of observers, and it is also possible to add a time variable – the
space that moves in time. We have three aspects at stake: a real land-
scape, the landscape literarily transposed and the new referential land-
scape that rises from the interaction with the author’s particularities,
and that can be used again as reference (Westphal, 2000). Robert Tally
follows the same path when presenting the idea of literary cartogra-
phy, according to which “the narrative becomes a cartographic practice
in which the writer produces an allegorical or figurative image of the
world and one’s place in it” (Tally, 2008: 2). From the writer’s point
of view, the nature of literary representation and its form and genre,
are elements that characterize and define his/her own view. As Eudora
Welty states in “Place in Fiction” the place for the writer is seen as a
frame, and the point of view is a kind of magnifying glass, made bright
with feeling and sensitivity, recharged every moment by the solar points
of the imagination (Welty, 1956)1. The short stories chosen here start
in a real landscape – the authors’ local experiences (in the instances of
Fialho de Almeida, Mário Braga and João de Araújo Correia) that are
literarily transposed; then, from the author’s magnifying glass derives
a new referential landscape that can be used as a cultural reference and
also manipulated by external forces (cf. text 8)
This essay will try to understand how, through a regional narrative
frame, some of the aesthetic, social and cultural landscapes in the Portu-
guese space are drawn. For this purpose, I will focus on four important
authors in Portuguese regional short narrative prose, from different
periods, within a chronological range covering the last quarter of the
nineteenth century up to the first half of the twentieth century. This
period, which witnessed the acceptance of the short story as a literary
genre in many European countries as well as in the United States and
in Brazil, reveals in Portugal a very strong predominance of the rustic

1 The writer herself used photography as a basis for many of her short stories. See
Almeida, 2007.

140
or rural short story over the modern short story, more centered in space
and inner rather than outer landscape.
If the concept of spatial form has, no doubt, been essential in
modern criticism, as much in literature as in art in general, in language
and in culture at large (Mitchell, 1980), Human Geography and espe-
cially Cultural Geography for their part understood the value of the
mental conceptualization and representation of place. The geographer
J. Nicholas Entrinkin (1991) in The Betweenness of Place – towards a
Geography of Modernity analyses several discourses which set out to
understand the value of place, namely the relation between the experi-
ence of knowing the place and the concept of specificity of the geogra-
pher, the role of place, its value and characterization in modern life, and
the comparisons between the causal relation in the historic narrative and
the geographical study of place and region. The study of this interde-
pendence appeared with the naissance of Geography.

2.  Landscape and region

The concept of region is defined as a homogeneous area with physical

and cultural characteristics, distinct from neighboring or surrounding
areas (Vance and Henderson, 1968: 377). But most of what Geogra-
phy has been studying in regard to the concept, suggests that region is
a spatial definition of the mind and not an objective reality (English,
1972:425). The relation with the idea of region comes from our concern
with organizing and structuring the information we have on space. This
underwent several stages in which the range of assessment and structur-
ing changed and conceptualized. The first notions on the character of the
physical land space would imply an idea of local identity or consistency
at a micro level; then there would appear the discovery of differences
between areas; the third level would be the harmonization of the spatial
process common to all inhabited places; finally, at a fourth level the
conceptual fulfilment – the interface between the spatial process and the

141
structural form. This latter one, higher, allows a sophisticated study of
complex regional systems (English, 1972: 426) and is related to Human
and Cultural Geography, interested in the study of people, of communi-
ties and of cultures (therefore of identity), with special emphasis on the
relations between space and place. Cultural geographers developed dif-
ferent understandings and definitions of landscape and these established
interdisciplinary connections with art history, visual theory, anthropol-
ogy and literary studies2.
Some of the most outstanding figures in this area are, for exam-
ple, Carl Ritter (1779–1859), considered together with Alexander von
Humboldt, one of the founders of modern Geography: he held the first
chair in Geography at the University of Berlin and his major work, the
19 volume Die Erdkunde im Verhältnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte
des Menschen (1816–59) underlines the influence of the physical envi-
ronment on human activity. Friedrich Ratzel (1844–04) introduced
the concepts of “Lebensraum” (“habitat” – a spiritual and nationalistic
space that would lead peoples from a more developed culture to want
to expand naturally, not aggressively but as a natural evolution) and
“anthropogeography”, which would become fundamental in Human
and Political Geography; Ratzel considers natural selection as a means
to understand how human beings react and use their environment, devel-
oping their own structure, and he sees countries as a growing organic
element, with borders liable to being altered. The spatial distribution of
a culture also depends on its physical environment and on the shifting
movements of populations, regarding neighboring peoples. These ideas
were later perverted both by his detractors and followers. In the twenti-
eth century two important works were published: Principes de Geogra-
phie Humaine (1921) by Paul Vidal de La Blanche, which emphasized
the importance of the human being as a geographical factor, both as an
active and passive factor, and The Morphology of Landscape (1925)
by Carl Sauer, who would greatly influence Cultural Geography. Sauer
defines landscape as an area made up of a distinctive association of

2 On the relation between Cultural Geography and Literature see Wylie, 2007; Sid-
dall, 2009; Mallory/Simpson –Housley, 1987; Moretti, 1998; Jackson, 1989.

142
forms, both physical and cultural, and tries to establish a system that
encloses his phenomenology with the purpose of grasping the variety
of the earth scene/life in all its meanings and colors. He distinguishes
natural from cultural landscape, stressing the anthropocentric aspect of
geography:
We cannot form an idea of landscape except in terms of its time relations as well
as its space relations. It is in continuous process of development or of dissolution
and replacement. It is in this sense a true appreciation of historical values that has
caused the geomorphologists to tie the present physical landscape back into its
geologic origins, and to derive it therefrom step by step. In the chorologic sense
however, the modification of the area by man and its appropriation to his uses are
of dominant importance. The area prior to the introduction of man’s activity is rep-
resented by one body of morphologic facts. The forms that man has introduced are
another set. We may call the former, with reference to man, the original, natural
landscape. […] The works of man express themselves in the cultural landscape.
There may be a succession of these landscapes with a succession of cultures. They
are derived in each case from the natural landscape, but expressing his place in
nature as a distinct agent of modification. Of especial significance is that climax
of culture which we call civilization. The cultural landscape then is subject to
change, either by the development of a culture or by a replacement of cultures.
[…] The division of forms into natural and cultural is the necessary basis for
determining the areal importance and character of man’s activity. […] The cultural
landscape is fashioned out of a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is
the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result. (Sauer,
1925:307; 309)

Above all, Sauer’s perspective is holistic and anticipates, in a more

restricted viewpoint, the awareness of time-space compression studies
of Kern or Harvey.
About forty years later, Etienne Juillard (1914–06) (“La region,
essai de definition”, Annales de Geographie, 1962) would deepen the
analysis of the geography of regional spaces, especially the European
ones, and would differentiate two principles in the regional unity: the
landscape-space that is based on criteria of uniformity (repetition of
certain elements, the natural region), and the functional space that is
based on criteria of the cohesion of organizational activities of a center
(the human mark, the humanization of the landscape, the change in nat-
ural environment). Landscape, therefore, reflects a momentary state of

143
interrelations, an unstable balance between natural conditions, human
technology, economic systems and demographic social structures.
Moreover, each landscape includes a variety of features inherited from
the past (English, 1972: 431).
The cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove (1948–2008), who worked
in the study of concepts and landscape representation, is one of the main
disseminators of the “New Cultural Geography” tendency, that focuses
on the complex interrelations between the multiple aspects of landscape
and the world, between landscape and representation (Cosgrove, 1989;
1998; 2008). According to Cosgrove, landscape is a cultural image, a
pictorial form of representing, structuring or symbolizing the environ-
ment around us; while studying a landscape as image and symbol, we
find a common ground among several subjects: geography, art, litera-
ture, social history and anthropology (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988: 1).
To understand the expressions marked by a culture on its landscape,
we need to know the “language” used: the symbols and their meaning
in that culture. All landscapes are symbolic, although the connection
between the symbol and what it represents, may seem very tenuous.
An important marble piece with names engraved on it, topped with a
cross and decorated with crowns and flags in the center of a city, is a
powerful symbol of national mourning for dead soldiers, though there is
no connection between the two phenomena, outside the particular code
of military memory (Cosgrove, 1989). The representation of landscape
in literature reflects all this, and it also reflects the vision, that is, the
physical visual register and the abstract sense of creation and projection
of mental images. Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) use Erwin Panofsky’s
iconographic approach to explain the conceptualization of images as
coded texts to be deciphered by those who know the cultural environ-
ment, in which they were produced. The three levels Panofsky distin-
guishes in the understanding of images – pre-iconographic descrip-
tion, iconographic analysis and iconographic interpretation – are also
relevant in the analysis of the narrative text that represents landscape.
For example, the third level will be grasped through the recognition of
principles that reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a

144
philosophical or religious tendency – filtered by a personality and con-
densed in a work (Panofsky, 1939).
To Cosgrove, this idea of landscape conveys a way of gazing, the
way the Europeans represented the world for themselves and for others,
the way they related to it, and through which they mirrored social rela-
tions. This point of view may be understood as a part of the history of
the economy and of society, whose consequences go beyond the percep-
tion of the land value, and whose techniques of expression are shared
with other areas of cultural practice (Cosgrove, 1998: 1). This argu-
ment would be considered thirteen years later, in the Introduction to
the 1997 edition by the author, as the major strength of the work and its
main weakness, an argument that would reveal several limitations, Cos-
grove himself documents in detail, in his Introduction. Some of them
are related, for example, to the silence (depreciating) about phenomena
such as modernity, the issue of genre, the post-colonial perspective or
the interference of the romantic nationalism of the end of the nineteenth
century, all of them leading to the change in the gaze at landscape. The
author underlines that art at the end of the nineteenth century and begin-
ning of the twentieth registers some of the most unchangeable images of
the European landscape, exploring the relation of modern life to space
and the environment. (Cosgrove, 1998: xxii). Literary representation is,
thus, affected by cultural landscape.
This is the relation I have set out to present, hoping to show how
the Portuguese landscape of this period, out of step in time with Euro-
pean modernity, is reflected in short story writing. At the level of sym-
bolic landscape, Cosgrove, still documenting the limitations of his 1984
volume, stresses the contributions of Kenneth Olwig (1996) and Simon
Schama (1995). Olwig argues that a more substantial understanding of
landscape is needed, as it derives from the historical study of concep-
tions and uses which alter (from the ground/landscape, country/coun-
tryside and nature); this understanding must include the relations of the
countryside with the city and admit the historical and contemporary
importance of community, culture, the law and tradition in the creation
of human geographical existence (Olwig, 1996: 645). Schama seeks
in Landscape and Memory to study in what way the relations with the

145
geographic landscape (from the themes wood, water and rock) were
imagined and represented in texts, paintings and other elements, show-
ing the mythic and the power of social memory in the construction and
affirmation of new identities by human communities. Two of the most
interesting examples are his description of the wood image evolution
from the work Germania by Cornelius Tacitus or the mythology associ-
ated to Robin Hood’s forest.

3.  Cultural and literary landscapes

3.1  Fialho de Almeida (1857–1911) – landscape as a basic structure

Oh! I wish I were a peasant, as if an exhalation of the landscape my sight

embraces from here, and quite strong, quite new, quite fulvous, coming
back at dusk from the wilderness, with my bundle of sticks on my head
[…].3

[Oh! Quem me dera ser um camponês, como que uma emanação da pais-
agem que o meu olhar abraça daqui, e bem forte, bem novo, bem fulvo,
recolhendo ao anoitecer dos matos, com o meu feixe de lenha à cabeça
[…].] (Almeida, 1946: 26–27)

In the article “The Panúrgio writers” (Almeida, 2000), considered a

kind of manifesto of Portuguese naturalism, Fialho defines the modern
novel as a genre that “aspires to be the complete photography of a soci-
ety caught unawares in its constant toil or in its inertia of decadence”
[“aspira a ser a fotografia completa de uma sociedade surpreendida no
seu labutar incessante ou na sua atonia de decadência”], a genre that
“through landscape features a place, so precise that it couldn’t be mis-
taken for any other, with its colours, its shades, its tints, its general most
accurate lines, its effects of light, its architecture and its flora” [“pela

3 All translations of this text by Helga Borges.

146
paisagem serve a dar feição de um lugar, de tal modo precisa que não
se confunda com qualquer outro, com as suas cores, as suas gradações,
as suas tonalidades, as suas linhas gerais fidelíssimas, os seus efeitos
de luz, a sua arquitectura e a sua flora”] (Almeida, 2000:335–336). The
descriptions, the drawing of physical and psychological characters and
the dialogue will add to this process of social analysis that demands, as
in observational sciences, an extreme patience, a crystal lens, a shrewd
eye and a grounded head.
The rural physical landscape in Fialho’s narratives can be distrib-
uted, in a broad sense into two big groups: the raw, barren, inhospita-
ble landscape where humans and animals are almost woven together
in suffering and death; and the landscape in which nature appears
with a heavenly, untouched beauty and usually does not include living
beings. This difference is accepted by the author when, in a chronicle,
he comments on the opposition arising from the change in perspective
as to the rural village: beautiful if observed from a distance, boring and
dieing if seen closely (cf. quotation of page 112). Human beings are,
as João Décio says (1969) shaped and influenced by the surrounding
nature, that is, the characteristics of the physical landscape permeate
animals and people. Hence two types of narrative process arise, the
lyric and the dramatic, in accordance with the kind of landscape from
which the text is born; in the lyric process we find the author’s direct
and sentimental impressions, his desire to lose himself and surrender
to a landscape that imposes its glitter (and excitement of the human
senses) and presents itself as a source of happiness: “the hubbub of
nature that strengthens and covers with new feathers”, “the hawthorn,
a coquette little jewel”; “the things with human features known to us”;
“love that rises from the ground invigorating the groves, spreads to
the nests, embraces the pairs of birds, overflows in the air like a bib-
lical wedding naphtha and spreads, breathes and goes on permeating
everywhere”; “the day rises with a heavenly grace” [“o borborinho da
natureza que se revigora e emplumesce”; “o pilriteiro, uma joiazinha
coquette”; “as coisas com fisionomias humanas conhecidas de nós”; “o
amor que sobe da terra a revigorentar os arvoredos, comunica-se aos
ninhos, cinge os casais de pássaros, extravasa no ar como uma nafta

147
de boda bíblicas e comunica-se, aspira-se vai-se infiltrando em toda a
parte”; “o dia ascende com uma graça paradisíaca” (Almeida, 1946:
1–9); in the dramatic process, in third person narrative, we find great
existential dramas, the struggle for survival, a constant and desperate
struggle against a poverty environment, illness, pain and death, full of
impossibilities and negative endings; the landscape in these narratives is
violently brute and visceral, harsh and untouched by man: “the phantom
of physical deformity” [“o espectro da deformidade física”] (Almeida,
1946: 47), the death of the newborn in “Conto de Natal”, the suffer-
ing of the sheep in “Mater Dolorosa” and others. The human creature,
sometimes very close to animalism and the animal itself, are intimately
associated to the landscape. I should emphasize the absence of plot in
the lyrical kind of text and even its lesser number; they represent the
narrator’s dreams of an old world, in which the splendor of the grape
harvest was replaced by the prosaic utterances of selfish life (Almeida,
1946: 28). It is also in these texts that Fialho refers to the “propiatario”’s
(landowner’s) selfishness and meanness, the disability of old people and
the blackened snouts which quarrel at Patana’s shop about the little aban-
doned children of that night, identifying the human types and the land-
scape (Almeida, 1946: 14; 17; 18). “Jantar no Moinho” (Almeida, 1882)
is also an example of the lyrical type text – without a structured plot, the
narrator reflects on the contrasts between the morbid refinement of the
city and the “good souls’ admirable serene ignorance” (Almeida, 1882:
316) of peasants, ending up in a dinner at a mill invited by a family of
millers4. There is still another type of rural physical landscape that does
not completely identify with the two mentioned before; I would call it
the peaceful and humorous countryside, and it appears in satirical and
critical short stories such as “A ideia da comadre Mónica” or “O milagre
do convento”. In this text, for example, side by side with the description
of the aridity of the Alentejo and decadence and abandonment of the
convent – “the pipes were crammed with roots and clumps of mud from
the last torrent; the aqueduct had fallen […] the wild fig trees burst […]
the convent burdened on the vivacious landscape looking like a beggar

4 See Prado Coelho, 1944; Lopes, 1987; Bernardes, 2001.

148
living on charity” [“a canalização atulhava-se de raízes e moitões de
lodo das últimas enxurradas; caíra o aqueduto […] as figueiras bravas
irrompiam […] o convento pesava na paisagem viva com um ar de
mendigo que esmola”] (Almeida, 1971: 217–218), there also occur
descriptions of abundance, color and tranquility that frame an enjoya-
ble, good mood narrative: “ripe wheat fields and green vineyards plen-
tiful with clusters”, “fig trees of wide leaves and white trunks in a siesta
stretching out”, “along the openings the murmur of imaginative songs”
[“searas maduras e vinhas verdes opulentas de cachos”,”as figueiras de
largas folhas e troncos brancos num espreguiçamento de sesta”, “pelas
clareiras estalava em notas vivas o rumor das cantigas imaginosas”]
(Almeida, 1971: 221–223). The short stories physical landscapes are
indissolubly connected to the social and cultural ones: in the chronicles
Os Gatos, Fialho considers Lisbon a corrupt and decadent city whose
vices degrade the rural populations; the solution for the rehabilitation of
the Portuguese people, should, in his opinion, be founded on education,
hygiene and economic development through work. The social conflicts
he witnessed, his belief in the inequalities of races (Gobineau) and in
the superiority of blonde ‘races’ did not allow him to include a healthy
and pure human nature in his rural short stories. The narratives reflect
and picture a cultural landscape which Fialho describes with clarity and
harshness in the chronicles: the decadence of traditional values with the
consequent reinforcement of the law of survival, human being becom-
ing the victim of other human beings, the old aristocracy ceasing to be
the social model, the middle-class masses that, by bringing the law of
numbers (massification), distort the quality and culture, the rural pop-
ulation that has acquired city vices. Education is a concern for Fialho.
He critiques the new generations’ weakness, the sub-standard education
of most Portuguese, the lack of educators’ training, the narrow-mind-
edness, the excess of tolerance, mediocrity, information manipulation
and the low level of cultural elites5, as can be seen in this excerpt from
Os Gatos:

5 See Verdelho da Costa, 2004, chapter III.

149
 There was a performance at the D. Maria of an insignificant play by Mr. Man-of-
letters Alberto Braga, A Estrada de Damasco, the last in a trilogy of needs the
company has resorted to satisfy newspaper reporters, on whom it depends, mainly
to show off to Lisbon stupidity and the despicable, to the extent that it is impossi-
ble to comprehend without stomach-churning scorn.
[Representou-se em D. Maria uma pecita do sr. homem de letras Alberto Braga,
A Estrada de Damasco, última duma triologia de necedades a que a empresa tem
recorrido para contento dos noticiaristas dos jornais, de que ela depende, princi-
palmente para armar à estupidez e vilania do público de Lisboa, chegada a um
extremo que se não pode abranger sem náuseas de desprezo.] (Almeida, 1953:233)

The reflection of economic, cultural and social relations in the land-

scape described (cf. Lefebvre, 1991: 33–36) is very well documented in
the pages on the “propiatario” (landowner): according to Fialho “large
tracts of land in the Alentejo belong to ten or twelve rich people who live
in big towns, indifferent to working on the land” [“grandes extensões de
território, no Alentejo, pertencem a dez ou doze nababos que vivem
nos grandes centros, indiferentes ao cultivo”] and only interested in the
rents while there are “poor devils working forty and fifty years, wear-
ing saragossa cloth, eating beans” [“pobres diabos a trabalhar quarenta
e cinquenta anos, vestindo saragoça, comendo chícharos”] (Almeida,
1946: 13–14). Shaped by his experience in the Alentejo and naturalism,
the author distances himself from the regional assumptions of Palavras
Loucas by Alberto de Oliveira who values the purity of the undeveloped
countryside as opposed to the city, “which is merely a bureaucratic and
administrative institution” [“que é apenas uma instituição burocrática
e administrativa”] that does not produce poets. To Oliveira “Portugal
is Minho, Doiro, both Beiras, the Alentejo and the Algarve” [“Portugal
é o Minho, o Doiro, as duas Beiras, o Alemtejo, o Algarve”] (Oliveira,
1894: 218–220), and it is from this countryside, where people live, that
writers and artists could emerge, using the rural landscape as a muse
of Portuguese art. The real landscape on which Fialho bases himself,
filtered by a naturalist and impressionist lens, creates a space of illusion
that boldly shows the real space, a new referential landscape marked by
the ethnotype of the Latin “races”, inferior and common, compared to
the blond.

150
3.2  João de Araújo Correia (1899–1985) – keeping the tradition

In July 1960, during the homage that, under the sponsorship of the Por-
tuguese Society of Authors, he was rendered in Lisbon, João de Araújo
Correia defended the Portuguese Language, Portuguese types, Portu-
guese issues, Portuguese landscapes, emphasizing that the term region-
alist used in a devaluing sense, is a mistake. He said:
It is most unfortunate that the accusation of regionalist and countryman has
become groundless. I wish I could be both and in such a way that I could pound
my breast proudly. If I were healthy and could spare time […] I would scour
Trás-os-Montes in search of the precious remains of the fabulous country and the
wonderful realm – as Camilo and Miguel Torga defined them […] The day the
countryside completely dies, there will be no more originality. The day the city
absorbs the countryside, everybody will mirror themselves in their gestures. The
same cocktail will be drunk at the same time, the same slang will be used and […]
the same important farce will be played.
[Pena é que se tenha tornado improcedente a acusação regionalista e provinciano.
Quem me dera a mim ser ambas as coisas e de modo tal, que pudesse bater no
peito com orgulho. Se tivesse saúde e dispusesse de tempo […] percorreria os
quatro cantos de Trás-os-Montes à procura de preciosos restos de província fab-
ulosa e reino maravilhoso – como Camilo e Miguel Torga definiram […] No dia
em que a província tiver morrido de todo, acabou-se a originalidade. No dia em
que a cidade absorver o campo, toda a gente fará de toda a gente espelho dos
seus gestos. Bebe-se à mesma hora o mesmo cocktail, fala-se o mesmo calão e
representa-se […] a farsa da importância] (Correia apud Chorão, 1986: 84–85).

This assumption of the author is revealed in a style whose goal is to

show the importance of the humble things of life in the country vil-
lage and its inhabitants, to show reality made up of small problems,
to defend the cult of traditions, of a past that will give meaning to the
future. Faithful to his geographical origins, Araújo Correia describes
the landscape of the Douro and Marão in the tradition of Camilo, but
the landscape in his short stories, namely in the case of Contos Bár-
baros (1939), is above all, built up of human types, whose simple lack
of sophistication, the author describes in detail. Here the physical land-
scape is used solely to frame the essential contours of the character’s
features and of the episode that revolves around him, and happens in

151
the context of the village’s life. As a defender of Mother Nature, he
draws attention to the destruction of trees. In the short story “A mimosa
do Carrapatelo” he remarks that in all of Carrapatelo there was not a
single tree left because “old people had planted many in the church-
yard and on the Monte […] but the modern ones came and uprooted
them all to clear it up” [“os antigos haviam plantado muitas no adro e
no Monte […] mas vieram os modernos e arrancaram-nas todas para
desassombrar aquilo”] inferring that “those stout trunks had been cut
down for the planting of sweet basil” [“aqueles troncos valentes foram
abaixo para plantio de manjericões”] (Correia, 2007.1: 39). In the short
story “O vestido branco”, the narrator also reveals his option for the
countryside after graduation, which surprises his parents tremendously:
“as soon as I graduated, instead of staying in the city waiting for a good
job or a rich fiancée, I went to the village to my parents’ house, farmers
[…] I became a pantheist from my heart; I became a naturalist from my
mind” [“mal me formei, em vez de ficar pela cidade à espera de bom
emprego ou noiva rica, meti-me na aldeia em casa de meus pais, lavra-
dores […] fiz-me panteísta pelo coração; tornei-me naturalista pela
inteligência”] (Correia, 2007.1: 53). But the real focus of his narratives
is the revelation of the idiosyncrasies of human landscape and regional
values: the old woman of the pots who even without the fair still puts
her tent up, till the day she dies under a thick layer of frost (“A Velha das
Panelas”), Uncle António Chapeleiro who, obsessed with the defence of
his property against thieves, ends up shooting his own grandson (“Os
Figos de Pau”), the story of Father Bento and his love of women and of
the books which were burnt after his death (“Os Livros do Diabo”), the
story of poor Miguel healed by the woman aristocrat who ends up in
jail because, out of jealousy, he twice tries to shoot her brother-in-law.
In the short story, ”Perdão”, the farm worker, who had killed his boss
in the dark, lives in the ruins of the almost palatial house, on a farm, a
fugitive. All the devastation of the physical landscape, the wilderness
hostile to human life, fits the character’s physical and moral degrada-
tion. This solitude is contrasted with the appearance of the new guest,
a wayward hunter whom the killer will treat gently. The young man,
the murdered man’s son, with a torn conscience, ends up running away,

152
leaving the exiled in tears. Araújo Correia’s experience as a rural doctor
is one of the factors responsible for this focus on human cases, which
he underlines in the chronicles, saying one has to be human before one
can be a doctor, and that technique does not matter if it is not preceded
by intuition towards what is human (Chorão, 2007).
The cultural and social landscape that supports the short stories
does not reflect any particular intention, except the revelation of the
human condition, namely through the introduction of the Douro man,
framed in the microcosm of his village. In elegant and flawless prose,
through the use of informal and vernacular language, the nicknames,
the realism of the observation, the description of small mannerisms
and prejudices, the plain realities, Araujo Correia’s intention is to be an
amplifying mirror of that world he considers so precious. Regarded by
many as Trindade Coelho’s heir for the rural nature of his short stories,
for the colloquiality, for the empathy created toward the characters, he
defines himself as more pessimistic than the Mogadouro writer. One
of his articles in a local weekly newspaper clearly reveals this attitude:
I’m writing, once again, to deeply regret the extinction of marvelous animals –
from little birds to crickets and fireflies.
In my time a night in a village, all through the spring months, was a heavenly
night. The nightingale stirred me with its song.
[…] Nowadays, I don’t know or know too well why, there are no night or day birds.
[…] It seems I’m the only one who mourns nature’s dusk, its death, even. Man,
crowned with vine shoots, is nowadays a kind of Noah in an empty ark.
[Venho, mais uma vez, deplorar o desaparecimento dos bichos encantadores –
desde os passarinhos até aos grilos e pirilampos.
Sou do tempo em que uma noite de aldeia, nos meses primaveris, era uma noite
divina. Cantava-a, de modo que me entontecia, o rouxinol.
[…] Hoje, não sei porquê ou sei demais porquê, não há pássaros nocturnos nem
diurnos.
[…] Parece que só eu choro o entardecer da natureza, o seu próprio trespasse.
O homem, coroado de pâmpanos, é hoje uma espécie de Noé numa arca vazia.]
(Correia, Maio 1982)

Araújo Correia is not an innovator, but a writer with roots firmly fixed
in the Douro landscape, who knows the language – on which he wrote
Enfermaria do Idioma (1971), – the traditional culture, and who believes

153
that a writer should reflect his landscape and mirror all the pictorial and
emotional motives that surround him, keeping at the same time a criti-
cal eye over his characters (Correia, 2010).

3.3 Branquinho da Fonseca (1905–1947) – the landscape that “places

us among the things of the world”

In Branquinho da Fonseca, and especially in the short story “Rio Turvo”

(1945), the physical landscape, more than connecting to the cultural
and social landscape as in Fialho, becomes one of the conditioning ele-
ments, definers of the characters’ life experiences. At the beginning of
the short story, the narrator stresses that “only the Sun and the trees
place us among the things of the world” [“só o Sol e as árvores é que nos
dão a nossa posição entre as coisas do mundo”] (Fonseca, 1945: 12).
This direct relation between landscape and men, materializes when he
compares the ferocity of humans with the serenity of the landscape over
night; the true face of the landscape, revealed during the day (Fonseca,
1945: 47) is framed in the short story by a muddy river which marks
the anguish, anxiety and indifference of those who live and work on it:
The anguish of living there, the nightmare of that sad landscape arose from being
between two things where you can’t go: the city afar, floating over the river, the
mountains, afar, backing away like a mirage before the steps of those who walked
towards them. Perhaps just the landscape was enough to justify the longing that
day and night, every day and every night, weighed over us, unaware of a reason,
without knowing how to defend ourselves. We finally sank into indifference for
everything, a moral and physical weariness, which was dangerous when awoken.
But that climate and that work were opium enough to tame the beast that grew in
each of us.
[A angústia de viver ali, o pesadelo daquela paisagem triste era estarmos entre
duas coisas onde não se pode ir: a cidade ao longe a flutuar sobre o rio, as mon-
tanhas, ao longe, a recuarem como uma miragem diante dos passos de quem
caminhasse para elas. Talvez só a paisagem fosse bastante para justificar a ânsia
que de dia e de noite, todos os dias e todas as noites, pesava assim sobre nós, sem
sabermos porquê, sem sabermos defender-nos. Caía-se por fim numa indiferença
por tudo, num cansaço físico e moral, que quando despertava era perigoso. Mas

154
 aquele clima e aquele trabalho eram ópio bastante para amansar a fera que crescia
em cada um de nós.] (Fonseca, 1945: 32)

The narrator, who at the moment of writing is in a small, quiet village

where he will try to organize his thoughts (Fonseca, 1945: 62) tells,
at a later moment, of the events lived at a certain time and in a certain
landscape, trying to understand, through this present meditation, his
own living experience of that far-away moment. The landscape is, thus,
assimilated to the narrator’s previous life experience and other people’s,
as if it were one whole unique theme block. At the beginning, the narrator
considers it “attractive”, master of “its own grandeur” (Fonseca, 1945:
10) – maybe because the mud, the wood, the frogs were a new world
for him, where he could breathe a little more freedom (Fonseca, 1945:
12). The river is central to this landscape. It is an unfathomable entity,
full of strength but of marshy texture, thus offering muddy, brackish,
dangerous water and treacherous, because of its shoals (Fonseca, 1945:
10), a symbol of immobility. This marsh is also the moral, oppressive
swamp, that imprisons the characters, that brings them criminal death
or death caused by the tide, as happens at the end. The narrator, who
has difficulty in placing himself in the world, acknowledges the strength
of the relation between humans and landscape, by stating that “maybe
without purpose or planned way” [“talvez sem finalidade nem caminho
traçado”] modern humans live a drama, out of which, “through cul-
tural broadening and mind refinement” [“pelo alargamento da cultura e
pelo afinamento do espírito”] (Fonseca, 1945: 24), the paths to follow
generate walls, stagnation and apathy, also because those who arrived
there already brought “a painful pilgrimage in the soul and bloodied
feet” [“uma peregrinação dolorosa na alma e os pés em sangue”] (Ibid:
29). The strange tone that permeates the text transfers from landscape
to humans, to animals, (the goat), to objects: “the strange panting in the
shadow that rose” [“o estranho arfar na sombra que subia”] (Ibid: 45).
Yet, the river is never really a part of the characters’ lives, because they
seem to be passing by, and because the river water is never clear, but
always muddy. This dimension of the physical environment, of danger
and treachery, of asphyxiation and death, results in the inexplicable
washing up of lifeless bodies by the water (Ibid: 33), and reaches its

155
climax in the death of the female character, Leonor, taken in a boat
without oars. She was the girl referred by the chief engineer as the
“flower of the marsh” [“a flor do pântano”], the real marsh that, he care-
fully reinforces, men are not, and that is going to be transformed in an
airfield (Ibid: 38–39). More than just a landscape element, this muddy
river attracts monstrosities and agglutinates feelings, ruminations, anx-
ieties and human instincts.

3.4 Mário Braga (1921-) – “Literature for the people and

not at the expense of the people”

In the Preface to the 1972 edition, Mário Braga tells the story of the
conception of Serranos. The book came to life when, around 1948,
already a graduate, he went to work as a private teacher at a boarding
school in Lousã. Alone and without a car or money to go home every
week, he begins, “in his free time, mainly on Sundays, rambling through
the steep mountain paths” [“nas horas vagas, aos domingos sobretudo,
a calcorrear os íngremes caminhos da serra”] (Braga, 1972: 32) letting
himself be touched by the grandeur of the landscape, the poverty of the
villages, the lack of sophistication of the inhabitants. So much so that,
during the lonely evenings, he devoted himself to describing that world
in “short, terse stories” [“histórias curtas e secas”], that had in common
the environment and some of the characters (Ibid: 33). He then created
a fictional mountain he calls Queiró, an example of life in the highlands
of Beira, “where only the geographical references, the rivers and the
other mountains are real” [“onde apenas são reais as referências geográ-
ficas, os rios e as outras montanhas”] (Ibid: 34). The volume comprises
eight short stories, as the author says, in an austere and sober style, in
keeping with the environment. The attempt to publish a short story in
the magazine Vértice was blocked three times by the Censor; the short
story ”Herança” was withdrawn because it could be seen as an attack
on private property, and because the description of the fire could sym-
bolize the Revolution; the short story “Dever” was refused because an

156
authority cannot be defeated, even in the literary world; the short story
“A noite era escura” was banned because its theme was smuggling.
The physical landscape is decisive in these texts; one could almost
say that it is even the leading figure. The characters’ lives and conflicts
are determined by the aridity of the landscape, by the poverty, balanced
between farming and herding. It is from this framing that Mário Dias
builds relations between people, trying to underline the conflicts aris-
ing from the possession of a meagre subsistence, the difference from
the richer, the need to emigrate, the fear of the gentleman, side by side
with the “halfwit” servant’s courage. As referred by Cosgrove (1998),
the perception of economic and social relations determines a particular
view of the land and a perception of the landscape.
In “Herança”, for example, the shack and old Ana’s farm live on the
well, whose exhaustion, due to the extinguishing of a fire, would mean
death for that year’s harvest and for the income of a whole lifetime:
Her husband had sacrificed his life to that hard land, the children had gone away,
and she had remained alone, year after year, she didn’t even know since when,
fighting to keep a property whose real value went beyond her, a piece of humus
that after all represented, her only defense against the feared poverty.
[O seu homem imolara a vida àquela terra dura, os filhos tinham abalado dali,
e ela ficara sozinha, anos e anos, já nem sabia desde quando, a lutar pela con-
servação de um bem cujo verdadeiro valor a transcendia, um pedaço de húmus
que representava afinal, a sua única muralha contra a receada miséria.] (Idem: 70)

In “Dever”, the issue that leads to the guard Zé Figo’s fatal mistake, is
a problem rooted in the physical landscape as well: the dispute between
two parishes about the wasteland firewood among the pine trees and
eucalyptuses. In “Emigração”, the young shepherd Manel Varão tries to
escape the poverty of his “dried up land where only stones grew” [“terra
seca onde só nasciam pedras”] (Ibid: 124), ending up by finding better
grazing lands for his herd. But life in that heaven is interrupted by the
need to do his national service; when threatened he might be arrested
by the guards, the shepherd, unaware of everything that went on in the
city, leaves again to save his herd, which will end up without grazing
lands, due to the mountains devastation. The last image reminds us of
one of the most striking ones in Fialho’s short story “Mater Dolorosa”,

157
when the little lamb also dies, this time of hunger, shaking next to its
mother’s body:
The lamb, letting go of the udder, fell exhausted, shaking, next to its mother’s
body, who only managed to turn her eyes, already clouded, towards her little
cub. It lasted for hours on end that double agony! Hours spent in remorse, which
crushed the shepherd’s conscience like stones.
[O cordeiro, largando a mama, tombou exausto, a tremer, junto do corpo da mãe,
que apenas conseguiu voltar os olhos, já nublados na direcção do filhito. Durou
horas e horas aquela dupla agonia! Horas pesadas de remorso, que esmagavam
como pedras a consciência do pastor.] (Ibid: 133)

In all the spaces, the economic and socio-cultural underdevelopment,

scarcity, oppression, stoppage, shortages, dominate. It is this same feel-
ing that forces António Lomba to leave for Brazil, in the short story
“Regresso”, where the family, the mountain, the mountain range and
people merge in the same solitude, reflected by the landscape that leads
the shepherd in “Balada” to steal the rich farmer’s hay, to feed his sheep,
or Calhurra to smuggle corn in the short story “A noite era escura”.
Mário Braga, thus, starts from the physical landscape, whose rugged-
ness stretches to the social and cultural landscape as in Fialho, to reveal,
from his neo-realistic point of view, the economic and political condi-
tioning of an epoch.
The relation between the real and the literary landscape is differ-
ent in all four authors mentioned: in Fialho and in Branquinho there
is a clear distance between landscape and its literary representation;
in these cases, the writer creates a new referential landscape, which
reflects glances external to the native population (Fialho’s questioning
glance and Branquinho’s philosophical one); in the cases of João de
Araújo Correia and Mário Braga, the literary landscape is closer to the
real physical contexts. Fialho, Araújo Correia and Mário Braga use the
ethnotype as a fundamental element of connection between the land and
the people; the same does not happen in Branquinho. In this case, one
could say, a heterotopic space is created that, in a sense, exists outside
a real context, a lunar space where it is not possible to plainly find the
relation between the landscape image and the cultural and economic
relations, at least in the more classical sense used by Cosgrove. In Mário

158
Braga, on the contrary, we could clearly apply Cosgrove’s more ortho-
dox (Marxist) reading. In Araújo Correia, the human landscape almost
absorbs the physical one; only the native point of view, the local folk-
lore is valued, in a complete acceptance of the poverty of the cultural
and economic landscape, implicit in the image presented. From this
short examination, it is possible to see that regionalism and the regional
(cf. Introduction pp. 13–14), placed in rural spaces, was a crucial focus
of the Portuguese short story production till the 1950s, including mod-
ernist dimensions, as happens in Fonseca’s writing6.

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Prado Coelho, J. (1944). “Introdução”. In Fialho de Almeida. Lisboa:
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8. Worldview and Ambivalence in the Portuguese
Regionalist Short Prose Narrative

Abstract: the relationship between literary regionalism and national

ideologies, common to several European countries, though develop-
ing from different axes and different forms, is an accepted social and
literary reality. In Portugal, Liberal ideology, Republicanism and the
Estado Novo [New State] interfered in this relation, using, transform-
ing and finally, fighting it. The intention is to show which paradoxes,
ambivalences and routes they created, having as a focus of analysis the
cultural representation of landscape (description), through the study of
the symbolism of elements, characters and point of view in regionalist
short prose narrative.

1.  Regionalism, ideology and landscape

The Portuguese regionalist short story has been a relatively unex-

plored subject. The Portuguese authors who have, so far, approached
it are Ana Costa Lopes, Massaud Moisés and Óscar Lopes. This focus
makes sense in relation to the recent reevaluation of modernism, in
the context of geography and globalization (Mao and Walkowitz,
2008; Brooker and Thacker, 2005; Wollaeger and Eatough, 2012). The
1980s resurgence of the debate about modernity grew around issues
like post-colonialism, global and transnational literature, and led to the
investigation of non-standard and non-canonical modernist movements,
outside of Euro American literatures (for example Brazilian, Caribbean,
Chinese or African). It brought the reconsideration of high/low cultures,
of the medium (oral, written or visual), of aesthetic quality and form,
of cultural and political history (Huyssen, 2005). In parallel, geogra-
phy and temporal inscriptions were more deeply taken into account in
the initial period of modernism (mid nineteenth century) and in less
visible literatures. It was accepted that the development of European
modernisms depended on the nature of national traditions and stages of
industrialization and that, in different degrees and places, there was a
clash between old and new, the city and a national culture, dominated by
a traditional country (Husseyn, 2005: 6–7). If in The Country of Pointed
Firs (cf. text 3) the writer was at the entrance of a not yet fully modern-
ized world, in the Portuguese short prose of the same period, which is
my focus here, the gap is much wider.
It is difficult to interpret regionalist fiction without considering
the problematics created by national ideologies and programs. Ambiv-
alence, underlined by Benedict Anderson (1983)1 and developed by
Bhabha (2000), between the language of those who write the image of
the nation and the life of those who live it, reveals itself more clearly
in a literature that is centered in region and landscape. An “imagined
community” – one that does not know most of its fellow members or
hear of them, but whose minds retain an image of their communion – is
conceived with limits, as sovereign and as being bound by comradeship
and fraternity (Anderson, 1983), despite the real conditions lived by
each individual. The discourse of regional narratives and, more spe-
cifically, of these landscapes, can help us understand that ambivalence
through the play of forces that is established between the image of cul-
tural authority and the act of composing the image out of one’s own
power2. Adapting Smith’s reflections – focused on the transformation

1 “What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not

with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems
that preceded it, out of which — as well as against which — it came into being”.
(Anderson, 1983: 19)
2 “The ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself
nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond
it. The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always
itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new ‘people’ in relation to the body
politic, generating other sites of meaning and, inevitably, in the political process,

164
performed by the intellectuals of demotic ethnies3 in political nations
(Smith, 1961: 64) – we understand that symbology, language and ideol-
ogy of certain types of nationalism relate to three fundamental referents –
region, history and community. The population’s life and symbolism
and its historical and popular traditions are ways of creating a certain
vision and cultural heritage. For this, on the one hand, the return to
nature and to its “poetical spaces” is explored as a sacred repository
of the popular and historical memory of the people, and on the other
hand, the worship of history and the evocation of a lost and common
golden age is stimulated. Another fundamental symbolic element in the
construction of this ideology is the family metaphor, both the nation as
a big family as that of the individual family that reflects the feeling of
loyalty and bond (Smith, 1991: 78). From another perspective, recent
theories on discourse (Foucault, 1966; 1969; 1971; Ricoeur, 1983–85;
Jameson, 1981) recognise that the distinction between the real and the
imaginary referents is not always clear, and both can work as semiotic
systems of meaning production, addressed to extra discursive entities.
Hayden White observes that, from this perspective, narrative can be
used as a form of teaching individuals to live in the conditions of their
real existence, or as a form as the socially prevailing groups try to make
social reality understood as an idealised narrative4

producing unmanned sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces for

political representation. […] The ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges
forcefully within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and
indigenously ‘between ourselves’”. (Bhabha, 2000: 4)
3 Smith defines ethnie (ethnic community) as “named human populations with
shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a spe-
cific territory and a sense of solidarity” (Smith, 1986: 32). He differentiates
demotic or popular from the aristocratic groups.
4 “Narrative is revealed to be a particularly effective system of discursive meaning
production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively ‘imaginary
relation to their real conditions of existence’ that is to say, an unreal but mean-
ingful relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out
their lives and realize their destinies as social subjects. To conceive of narrative
discourse in this way permits us to account for its universality as a cultural fact
and for the interest that dominant social groups have not only in controlling what

165
 Regionalist fiction5 which in Portugal grew from the last quarter of
the nineteenth century onwards, particularly the short prose narrative,
due to the lesser reading time it requires and ease of dissemination in
periodicals, favors the encouragement, by the dominant ideology, of a
strategic representation of human, cultural and physical landscape ele-
ments, that serve its own propaganda plans and values. This use must
be considered carefully. It must be stressed that, roughly and apart from
the discussions to which the subject gives rise, the regionalist writers
(as this subgenre and the literary form of the “short story”) are seen as
second-rate writers or lesser writers. And in fact, the most innovative
and avant garde writers, often do not fit this tendency, either for what
they write or for the positions they assume. Óscar Lopes reminds us that
second-rate literature reveals the mental atmosphere of an epoch, more
clearly than the most original and personalized works of the period
(Lopes, 2002a: 156). Fialho de Almeida is an exception; however, the
frustration of his literary ambition reflected in the chronicle “Tragédia
de um homem de génio obscuro” (Almeida, 1992) is known. Literary
history shows us that regionalist literature was, in certain cases, an
access point for writers’ affirmation, as it does not demand elaborate
literary techniques but only closeness to the author’s world. In Portugal,
the regionalist convention, through the discussion and multiplicity of
forms it initiated, made room for the consolidation of the short story as
a literary genre. This literature, however, is tainted with a fundamental
ambiguity and duality, more accentuated and visible in Portugal: the
cultural gap that existed between the peasantry and the more cultivated
social and political elite. The consequence of this was a dualist vision of

will pass for the authoritative myths of a given cultural formation, but also in
assuring the belief that social reality itself can be both lived and realistically com-
prehended as a story”. (White, 1987: x)
5 K. D. M. Snell defines regionalist fiction as “fiction that is set in a recognizable
region, and which describes features distinguishing the life, social relations, cus-
toms, language, dialect or other aspects of the culture of that area and its people.
Fiction with a strong sense of local geography, topography or landscape is also
covered by this definition”. (Snell, 1998: 1)

166
the countrified world I will discuss later, that allowed some social elites
to manipulate rural symbolism.
The reading public is another question. Progress in education in
Portugal, in France or in the United Kingdom had very different effects
on the process I referred to, before. In Portugal, for example, the poor,
simple folk, represented in regionalist literature was also described as
illiterate, and not reading this literature. The target of the process of
aesthetic idealisation was the middle-class reader, and it was from this
reader that inequality was hidden. Luís Trindade analyses this process,
centering on Salazar’s ideas and mainly in essayistic texts (not narrative
ones), also coming to the conclusion that, around 1940, there was a
distance between Portugal and Portugal; the rural and historic coun-
tryside that nationalists wanted to validate, and the penurious people
of the countryside and the cities. Regionalist literature, namely short
prose narrative, was one of the forms used, through natural culture and
aesthetics, to bring the plain citizen to the staging of a reality that was
in fact adverse to him/herself (Trindade, 2008)6. At the same time, the
very process frequently gave rise to ambiguities and counter reactions,
and Portuguese neorealism is an example of this. The procedure devel-
oped in very different ways in cultures and societies such as the French,
British or Portuguese. This means that the use of narrative referred to
by White, encloses, when observed in real space, in the real landscape,
different ways, ambiguous and even conflicting. The analysis of his-
torical context and ideology is defined by him as a process through
which different types of meaning are produced and reproduced, by the

6 “The distance between Portugal and Portugal can thus be measured, in the first
place, between nationalism as worship of the rural and historical country and the
need to fight the objectors politically; in the second place between the religious
nature of the Portuguese and the progressive withdrawal of urban life from faith;
in the third place between the superiority of spiritual woman and the entrance of
her body in the public space. […] But this separation surpassed the line of the
horizon (..) in the distance between a people harmoniously arranged in the images
of nationalism and the real, destitute people of the countryside and the cities […]
Culture, staged by humans, materialises ideology as an aestheticisation of reality
[…] Culture as staged aestheticicisation produced by ideology prevails over real-
ity”. (Trindade, 2008: 305 and 309). All translations of text 8 are mine.

167
constitution of a mental structure in relation to the world; in this struc-
ture certain sign systems are privileged as natural and even necessary
forms to recognise a “meaning” in things and others are suppressed,
ignored or hidden, in the same process of world representation to con-
science. This is very clearly explained in the chapter “The Context in
the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History” (White, 1987:
185–213) through the example of a famous text “The Education of
Henry Adams”7. White concludes that the details of the historical con-
text are clarified through the text movements, that is, the literary form
that was chosen transformed life into a symbol of the contemporary
sociocultural processes of its author. And this is a sublimation of mean-
ing, the answer of the human consciousness to its world in all places and
at all times; when we disarticulate its rich symbolic content, we desub-
limate it and return it to its status as an immanent culture product from
where it came. The same question is studied by Bertrand Westphal,
however from the point of view of literary criticism and concentrating
on the notion of space. The concept introduced by Westphal, geocrit-
icism, centres on the perception and representation of space, seeking
to understand how far the texts are between a representation of reality
and a possible world that is defended or proposed. Lived, perceived and
designed space (or imagined or represented) is different, and the inter-
face between reality and fiction is evidenced in the words and in their
position along the truth axis, of verisimilitude and falsehood (Westphal,
2011)8. Representation may have a certain level of conformity with the

7 Henry Adams’s meditative introspection about educational, social, technological,

political and intellectual transformations during the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies.
8 “The interface between reality and fiction lies in words, in a certain way of posi-
tioning them along the axis of truth, verisimilitude, and falsity, away from any old
mimetic fancy or axiology. Words along with gestures, sounds and images, are
also caught up in the movements that support the representation of space. Speech
can be that of conceived space, as with speech of the urban planner who projects
the map of a place but it may well also be integrated into the lived space, which
(according to Lefebvre) is the space of representation. It is then that literature
finds something to say – yes, not only to transcribe – into the text. This is poetic
work. […]. Poetic work gives being by naming; it gives birth. […] Thus it is a

168
referent, playing with the reader and with itself. Westphal calls the first
of these relations homotopic consensus, the second heterotopic interfer-
ence and the third utopian excursus. Homotopic consensus, compared
to Ricoeur’s “quasi-passé” concept (2005), is one where confusion can
exist between the referent and its representation, and is the most easily
identifiable with regionalist narratives. Westphal presents four features
as essential elements of this analysis methodology: multifocalization,
polysensoriality, stratigraphy and intertextuality (Westphal, 2011: 122),
and it is with theses notions in mind that I will approach the texts.
Multifocalization is the observation of a space from the point of
view of different observers, which can be related to artistic perception
and the author and narrator’s perception; questions such as the vari-
ation of the observer situation in relation to the reference space are
involved; this variation can go from the familiar and intimate that char-
acterises the autochthonous vision of space to the vision of the travel-
ler, going through other intermediate views9. This approach is useful to

theatre of memory. It is through language that we must restore it, reinvent it”.
(Westphal, 2011: 77)
9 “The different aspects of geocriticism are contained in nuce in the premises of
spatiotemporality, transgressivity and referentiality. The specificity of geocriti-
cism lies in the attention it pays to a place. The study of a viewpoint of an author
or of a series of authors, which inevitably posits a form of identity will be super-
seded in favour of examining a multiplicity of heterogeneous points of view,
which all converge in a given place, the primum mobile of the analysis. Without
hesitation I would say that multifocalization is the chief characteristic of geocrit-
icism. The multiplication of points of view renders all the more visible the sen-
sory perception or sensual perception that the authors have of space. […] Since
polysensoriality is thus a quality of all human spaces, it is up to the geocritic to
take a fresh look, to listen attentively and to be sensitive to the sensory vibrations
of a text and other representational media. Multifocalization and polysensoriality
can be considered in synchronic slices, but they will become more memorable as
the space evolves over time […] Because space only exists in its temporal strata,
geocriticism will have an archaeological – or better, stratigraphic – vocation […]
Multifocalization is expressed in three basic variations. The point of view is rel-
ative to the situation of the observer with respect to the space of reference. The
observer engages with this space through a number of relations ranging from
those of intimacy or familiarity to those that are more or less absolutely foreign.

169
understand how the view of different authors, with different ideological
positions and different purposes, describes the same space, and how
some social groups use this perspective to produce certain effects on
a certain public. Through regionalist narrative and more specifically,
through landscape description, some defended the status quo and others
fought it. By articulating a corpus around the same spatial referent, one
can understand the role of this type of narrative through the expecta-
tions, reactions and strategies of each author.
The notion of polysensoriality draws attention to the fact that the
relationship with the world develops through all the senses, and that this
can be globally apprehended through synaesthesias, creating an inter-
face between a world open to the senses and the representation of this
world in the interior landscape of the mind10. Stratigraphic vision seeks
to recognise and analyse the impact of time in the perception of space,
and the fictional text can bring up the wrinkles of time that compose a
place; in the case of regionalist narratives reflecting predominantly past
and present, in other cases anticipating the future. Barney Warf writes
on this: “The study of time and space is therefore much more than an
abstract academic exercise, but an analysis of politics, for time and
space are deeply implicated in how societies are structured and change
and how people live within them” (Warf, 2008: 2).
In the wide notion of space that geocriticism studies, it is important
to make a distinction between nature and landscape. Landscape is differ-
ent from nature as it is “always organised by the capture of an (ocasion-
ally) immobile gaze, presupposing the perspective, that is practised on

This reflects the fact that the point of view alternates between endogenous, exog-
enous or allogenous characters”. (Westphal, 2011: 122 and 128)
10 “The experience of an environment comes from all the senses. As Tuan notes
‘Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person
knows and constructs reality. The modes range from the more direct and pas-
sive sense of smell, taste and touch to the active visual perception and the indi-
rect mode of symbolization’ […] In any event, all the senses convey perception
in so far as they receive information (kinesthetic or biochemical sensation) and
develop that information through a mental process (identification or association).
Therefore, sensoriality allows the individual to conform to the world. It contrib-
utes to the structure and definition of space”. (Westphal, 2011: 132–133)

170
a homogeneous whole, preferably captured by a direction and a way of
the gaze” (Buescu, 1990: 66). It implies the existence of a gaze that per-
ceives and captures nature, as organised image and of a literary discourse
evoked by this image, a discourse that appears as a construction from a
certain perception of the real. It is in this matter, in the notion of con-
struction, that the concept of landscape can be related to White’s think-
ing; the perspective that landscape presents is also a way of building and
knowing the world, an answer by human consciousness to its world. The
short regionalist narratives of the period between 1860 and 1950 create a
cultural, human and physical landscape, which reflects the interpretation
of the conflicts of identity and reality. The different distances of narrator
and characters to nature and landscape affected by lived experiences or to
the present, produce very different results in the narratives.
This rural world is seen from two different perspectives: on the one
hand “the romantic and idealised vision of nature where, along with the
picturesque descriptions of nature, the peasantry is identified as patriar-
chal, religious, morally sound and not perverted by external influences
and material values” and on the other “the pessimistic, dark vision that
tends to represent the peasantry as passive, backward and a failure,
clinging to ancestral routines and hostile to agricultural modernization”
(Vaquinhas, 1993: 479). As a result of this, we have in literature either
submissive and hardworking characters, or animalistic ones directed
by instinct. Beyond these two types, the characters of the Portuguese
regionalist short narratives present a large diversity. Vaquinhas empha-
sises that such a duality starts in the heterogeneity of reality itself and of
factors such as: the very slow evolution, in different rhythms and in dif-
ferent regions of the land’s tenure, of its exploration and consequently
of social categories (that is, the landowner, the wealthy farmer, the
day-labourer), determined by the conditions of existence; demographic
growth; the evolution of the social structure (multiplication of landown-
ers, cutbacks in the number of day-labourers, the division of property,
the formal disappearance of collective rights). From the cultural and
behavioural point of view, it draws attention to practices such as sparse
and monotonous nourishment, wine consumption, playful and socia-
bility practices, the use of violence as a means of conflict resolution,

171
censorship rituals and social disciplining. (Vaquinhas, 1993). The social
space integrates actions of individual and collective subjects who are
born and die, suffer and act (Lefebvre, 1991: 34–36). Everything is doc-
umented, in homogeneous or differentiated forms, in regionalist short
narratives. From the political point of view, the duality between the
capital and the rural environment was also notorious: Lisbon and Porto
were very politicised cities and their electoral results were fundamental;
however, in fact the amount of delegates elected by the countryside,
dominated by caciquism, prevailed although this tendency started to be
corrected by João Franco’s reforms11. This helps to understand why the
point of view, the symbolism of the characters and landscape are funda-
mental aspects to be considered in this type of text.
Why these texts? I have selected texts where the landscape is, above
all, the most determining element. Although the divisions are artificial,
as there are intersections and variants, we can apprehend that there are
at least three types of landscape present in the Portuguese regionalist
short narrative, during the second half of the nineteenth century and
the first half of the twentieth century: landscape marked by idealisation
(fresh and healthy); landscape marked by decadence; landscape marked
by oppression and aggression/rebellion. The textual elements that seem
more relevant for the comprehension of the form, as these types of land-
scape transform life into a symbol of contemporary sociocultural pro-
cesses for their authors, are: focalisation or point of view, the character
and the symbolism of the elements.

2.  Idealised landscape

In 1849 António Feliciano Castilho published Felicidade pela Agricul-

tura. In this collection of essays he defends the excellence of rustic life,
the ennobling of the farmer and the central value of agriculture, an art

11 See Tavares de Almeida, 1985.

172
that all sciences court and serve12. Later, Alberto de Oliveira in Palavras
Loucas (1894), to which I will refer in more detail in the next topic,
considered by some as the manifesto of Portuguese regionalism, pro-
poses neo-Garretism and therefore defends a return to the vernacular
and rustic13. The holding of the Casino Conferences and the positions

12 “The widely varied art of forcing the land to produce everything is not a rough art
as all the sciences court and serve it; not obscure as it is the oldest and most uni-
versal; nor is it ignoble or despicable as it only depends on God while all people
depend on it. […] Do you hear in the big cities that deep hum of a thousand voices
like the roar of the oceans? It is the clanking of industry, the traffic of commerce,
the drunkenness at tables, the hubbub at the shows. What fairy produced and
preserves all this? Agriculture”.
[“A arte variadissima de obrigar a terra a produzir tudo não é uma arte rude, pois
todas as ciências a cortejam e a servem; não obscura pois é a mais antiga e univer-
sal; não vil nem desprezível, pois só depende de Deus enquanto os homens todos
dependem dela. […] Ouvis nas cidades grandes aquele sussurro profundo de mil
vozes, como bramir de oceanos? É o estrépito da indústria, o trafego do comércio,
a ebriedade das mesas, o vozear dos espectáculos. Que fada produziu e conserva
tudo isso? A Agricultura”.] (Castilho, 1849:15–16)
13 “In Portugal it would be necessary for the poets like us to emigrate to the villages,
getting used to a sweet monastic life, deep in sad libraries, full of old books, on
whose covers the boredom of French booklets would be suggested. And we would
learn Portuguese history in conviviality with the almost primitive inhabitant of
Beira or with the inhabitant of Trás-os-Montes, rough as furze, with the super-
stitious fishermen when they walk along the roads singing the Blessed hymn,
from pilgrimages to São João, bizarre as Japanese parties, which in Braga have a
unique charm. We would see in the sunsets village funeral processions marching
to the sound of bells in the middle of the maize fields; the mountain burn clearings
of such sinister effect in the dark nights; the beating of the linen in the moonlight
like the beat of a fairy, with rhythms that rise up dream stairways to the nuns of
the Milky Way… Maybe if we did this we would understand the character of our
country and could see the wide thoroughfares we can draw from one moment to
another, full of the modern in the middle of this worn out Literature”.
[“Em Portugal seria necessário que nós os poetas emigrassemos para as aldeias,
habituando-nos a uma vida doce e monástica no fundo de bibliotecas tristes,
cheias de velhos livros, em cujas capas nos viesse como insinuado, o tédio das
brochuras francesas. E aprenderiamos história portuguesa no convívio do Beirão
quase primitivo ou do Transmontano rude como um tojo, dos pescadores da costa
supersticiosos, quando vão nas estradas cantando o Bendito, das romarias ao

173
assumed by the 70s generation had already brought a new perspective
on literature, art and society, trying to awaken Portugal to the big trans-
formations in Europe and the world. The cultural and geographic isola-
tion of the country should be overcome; the introversion of the nations
in their patriotism, looking at the others with indifference, had been
overcome; it was necessary to conjure up wider communities14. From
the political point of view, the ideals of regeneration started with the
1851 military intervention, had already originated the attempt to fill the
nation with progress through economic development and modernisa-
tion, to reduce the asymmetries between regional areas and the coast,
and to bring liberal ideals to a society marked by obscurity and immo-
bility. Here agriculture was still the main economic occupation but there
was an awareness that this should not be disconnected from the social
framework and from the system of rural organization, to obtain more
productivity. It was also necessary to apply modern techniques already
in use in other European countries. Fontes Pereira de Melo appointed an
agronomist for each administrative district of the country, as he consid-
ered it necessary to educate farmers; rural work was a vocation that had
to be stimulated from parents to children, and the State had to cooperate
in this support.
In line with this reality, one can understand that circa the third quar-
ter of the century, the human and physical landscape of short regionalist
narratives was closely linked to the ethics of rural work, to the romantic
pattern and to its type of narrator, for example in the use and also in the
construction of the narrative point of view. These narratives are presented
from the point of view of the traditional storyteller, who at the end of

San-João, bizarras como festas japonezas, que em Braga são de um encanto

único. Veríamos, aos poentes, enterros na aldeia caminhando, ao tlim-tlim das
campaínhas, pelo meio dos milhos; as queimadas das serras, de um tão sinis-
tro efeito nas noites negras; as espadeladas ao luar, taes quais rondas de fadas,
com ritmos que sobem, por escadas de sonho, até às freirinhas professas da Via
Láctea… Talvez assim compreendessemos o carácter do nosso país e vissemos
bem largo o caminho que nos podemos traçar de um momento para o outro, cheio
de novo, no meio desta Literatura fatigada”.] (Oliveira, 1894: 32)
14 See Reis Santos, 1930.

174
the day gathers a small audience around him, and whom he delights
with small stories “full of truth and morality” (Paganino, 2003: 14)15.
Os contos do tio Joaquim (1861) by Roberto Paganino, who, as the
author states in the first chapter, belongs to the genre of Emile Souves-
tre’s work, mainly as regards the collection Au coin de feu, establishes
a pattern for this popular figure (intertextuality). Here we find a framed
narrative in which the first narrator, during his stay on a farm far from
Lisbon, highlights the figure of the old storyteller, reporting the narra-
tives that he has heard from him: “of so many stories I heard from Uncle
Joaquim, this was the one that struck me most” [“de tantos contos que
ouvi ao tio Joaquim, foi o seguinte que maior impressão me produziu”]
(Paganino, 2003: 21). In the last chapter, titled “The narrator’s history”
uncle Joaquim’s story is told by Joaquim himself to the narrator, thus
returning to the first narrative. The work very clearly illustrates the
problem of multifocalization through the exploration of the narrator’s
positions, of the storyteller, of the audience and of the moral and peda-
gogic tone that pervades the text.
The narrator comes from the city (“I spent winter on a farm not far
from Lisbon; because, as they said, my life was in danger if I did not have
a change of climate as soon as possible” [“fui passar o Inverno a uma
quinta, pouco distante de Lisboa; porque, segundo diziam, corria perigo

15 “At twilight the workers, the malteses as they are called, came back from work
and went into one of those country kitchens, so well-known, so familiar to all of
us: and that are not few on a farm of a certain type. A good fire and a good supper
awaited them, and above all, what they wanted most, the stories of Uncle Joaquim
were awaiting them […] Who was Uncle Joaquim, what had he been, what role
had he played, all questions that naturally will come to the minds of our readers’,
if we have any, and which we will not be able to answer as we would like to”.
[“À boca da noite recolhiam os trabalhadores, os malteses como ali lhe chamam,
do trabalho e entravam para uma dessas cozinhas de campo, tão nossas, tão con-
hecidas de todos: e que não faltam em quinta alguma de certa ordem. Esperava-os
um bom lume e uma boa ceia, e sobretudo esperava-os, que era o que eles mais
queriam, as histórias do tio Joaquim […] Quem era o tio Joaquim, o que fora, que
papel representava, são perguntas que naturalmente hão-de vir à boca dos nossos
leitores, se os tivermos, e a que não poderemos responder como desejámos”.]
(Paganino, 2003: 14)

175
de vida, se não mudasse de ares quanto antes”] [Paganino, 2003: 13]),
therefore assuming an external and partly privileged position in rela-
tion to the storyteller and to a popular and traditional community,
before which he reflects in an evaluative and moralising record; having
defined himself from the beginning as a mere re-teller of the stories he
has gathered (“Trusting this we started the collection which we merely
reproduce, attributing all the glory, if there is any, to Uncle Joaquim
and all the taint to those who, maybe spoiling it, are now disclosing
it to the public” [“Confiados nisto mesmo também é que começámos
esta recolha de que somos meros reprodutores, cabendo toda a glória,
se a houver, ao tio Joaquim, e toda a mácula àqueles que, estragan-
do-a talvez, a vêm agora dar ao público”] [Paganino, 2003:16]), he also
defines himself as an heir to the memory of the oral story through his
complicity with the storyteller. This effect is attained through the fading
of the frontier between two diegetic levels and through frequent ref-
erences to the action of listening and narrating, taking place between
the narrator, uncle Joaquim and the audience16 (“It will be ten years in
the next grape harvest since I heard Uncle Joaquim tell this story”; “A
few days later I heard from Uncle Joaquim the name of the cemetery
keeper “ [“Faz para as vindimas dez anos que eu ouvi ao tio Joquim esta
história”; “Dias depois vim a saber pelo tio Joaquim quem era o guarda
do cemitério”] [Paganino, 2003: 59 and 108]).
The storyteller gathers the moral and witnessing functions of the
memory of tradition; Uncle Joaquim recognises his community and the
space in which it moves, gets along well with the characters in this
community, assuming himself as the traditional figure of the old man
experienced and respected; in the few moments when he challenges the
decision of the assembly as in the story “O sexto mandamento”, this
disagreement is only a strategy to illustrate a religious principle with a
story, to which the listeners had not been responsive (“By majority vote
such case was impossible […] or it had been the rubbish of a Hebrew
patriarch […] Uncle Joaquim protested against the assembly’s decision
and to justify his protest he asked to speak” [“Foi votado por maioria

16 See Duarte, 2012.

176
que tal caso era impossível […] ou fora um grande disparate do patri-
arca hebreu […] Protestou o tio Joaquim contra a decisão da assem-
bleia, e para fundamentar o seu protesto pediu a palavra”] [Paganino,
2003: 153]). His moral authority is also asserted by his having directly
witnessed the cases he describes, and by the knowledge he has of the
community space (“The death of Manuel Simões reminds me of a case I
heard of some time ago”; “This António reminded me of João da Tenda
who lived down there next to master Raimundo’s houses” [“A morte
do Manuel Simões fez-me lembrar um caso a que assisti há tempos”;
“Este António faz-me lembrar o João da Tenda que vivia lá em baixo ao
pé das casas do mestre Raimundo”] [Paganino, 2003: 21 and 41]). As
Noélia Duarte pertinently emphasises, the storyteller/Uncle Joaquim
communicates expressively with the assembly, which reveals his own
involvement and the audience’s, leading to the creation of a kind of
updating of the short story, that allows him to understand and lead its
reactions in an ethical direction. The hypothetical reader will imagine
him/herself as a member of this traditional assembly17.
The audience, comprising a rural and working community of
Lisbon’s environs, feels real esteem and respect for the “old narrator”
(Ibid: 21); it requests the narrative, asks questions and respects the nar-
rator’s will but also interacts with him, and this originates the creation
of a true narrative space for the act of telling; the short story “O Sexto
Mandamento” is about the confrontation between two worlds, through
the dissonant and not moralising interpretation of João Carriço in rela-
tion to the story narrated (Ibid: 21). But the moral aim objectified in
the constant use of proverbs and pedagogy based on Christian morality,
through the use of biblical figures and subjects sets the prevailing tone;

17 “From the listeners mentioned, at whom the intervention is directed, we know

the reactions to the storyteller, the level of involvement in the story and the good
or bad result of what is told. Their attitudes are also verbally and physically
expressed and their asking influences the storyteller. When apprehending the
characteristics of that other element implied in the oral tradition, that refers to the
narratee, readers become familiar with the idea that they themselves are members
of the traditional audience”.
(Duarte, 2012: 87)

177
the highlighted landscape is the human; the characters, their attitudes
and options are the centralising pole of these narratives, rather than the
symbolism of nature or rural life. Lefebvre (1991: 27–30) explains how
the “illusion of natural simplicity” and the “illusion of transparency”
work together to develop certain types of symbolism and images that
may obscure rationality. For example:
In the place where the story whose plot we are going to read starts […] Joaquim
dos Santos had been one of the most mischievous boys of the environs.
Tomás was born around those places that were richer in laziness than in love
of work; he seemed to be made to be the lord of the manor, the devilish boy, he
wanted nothing to do with farming or studies.
André Pimenta, one of the most talked-of workers around the place where this
happened, put shouldered his hoe.
[No sítio onde começa a acção da história que se vai ler […] Joaquim dos Santos
fora um dos mais endiabrados rapazes daqueles lugares (Paganino, 2003:126).
Tomás nascera por aqueles sítios mais rico de preguiça do que de amor ao tra-
balho; parecia feito para morgado o demónio do rapaz, não queria saber de lavoura
nem de estudo. (Ibid: 166)
André Pimenta, um dos trabalhadores mais falados dos sítios onde este caso acon-
teceu, deitara a enxada ao ombro”.] (Ibid: 93)

The descriptions of the physical landscape or of rural tasks are mainly

used to frame, briefly, the narratives or actions of characters as in the
short story “Como se ganha uma demanda”:
It was the end of November, at nightfall. The wind from the south blew hard […]
As is common in winter in the countryside there had been almost no twilight. The
sun had hardly set and darkness fell over the fields. In the spot that is the setting
for the action of the story we are about to read […]
The sounds of the fields start to fade as workers down tools pointing to the close-
ness of night.
[Era pelos fins de novembro, ao aproximar da noite. Soprava rijo o vento das
bandas do sul […] Como é vulgar no Inverno, no campo, quase não houvera
crepúsculo da tarde. Apenas se escondera o sol e já a escuridão baixara sobre os
campos. No sítio onde começa a acção da história que se vai ler […] (Ibid: 125)
Os rumores do campo começam a esmorecer com o largar do trabalho indicando
a proximidade da noite.] (Ibid: 150)

178
However, the relationship of the senses with the natural world (polysen-
soriality) has a relatively distant effect on the inside of the characters
and is not deepened. Innocence and idealization, that some descrip-
tions illustrate, are ordinarily used as metaphors for moral frugality and
simplicity, defended throughout the whole work, and evidenced in this
excerpt:
It is as simple and poor as the Redeemer’s crib.
[…] From one of the sides, a small hill covers the slope, carpeted with vineyards
and olive trees, crowned with mills that loosen their sails in favour of the after-
noon breeze; from the other the eye sweeps over orchards and vineyards, in the
middle of which the small houses of the place sparkle, and dark green olive trees
are cut out against the pure blue of the heavens. […]
The afternoon has been running peacefully, and nature smiles in the meadow
flower as in the tree in the wood. Sitting on a stone bench badly constructed by an
uncouth artist is the priest, next to him the still open Gospels.
[É simples e pobre como o presépio do Redentor.
[…] De um dos lados, sobe a encosta um pequeno outeiro atapetado de vinhas
e oliveiras, coroado de moinhos que desprendem as velas a favor da viração da
tarde; do outro a vista divaga por meio dos pomares e terras de vinha, no meio
das quais alvejam as casinhas do lugar, e se recortam no puro azul dos céus as
oliveiras verde-negras. […]
A tarde tem corrido serena e a natureza sorri na flor do prado como na árvore do
bosque. Sentado num banco de pedra mal afeiçoado pela mão de rude artista está
o pároco, junto a si os evangelhos depostos e ainda abertos.] (Ibid: 150)

It is clear that the perception and vision of those who perceive defines
what is selected by the point of view, what is seen and the way what is
seen is reflected18.
The effect of time on the perception of space (stratigraphic vision)
is implied throughout all the stories, but is manifest in the first and
last parts (“O tio Joaquim” and “A história do narrador”), whose time
and space informants are clear; however, the play created between the

18 According to Helena Buescu “in two different ways, through point of view and
interpretation, questioning the process that leads the natural element to present
itself as symbol, necessarily leads to the establishment of a perceptive subject,
who can feature him/herself indistinctly as character, narrator or character-
narrator”. (Buescu, 1990:114)

179
narrator’s point of view, the storyteller’s and the audience bring about a
spatio-temporal volume closed in itself, in which all narratives, except
“O Sexto Mandamento”, succeed in harmonising the endings of the
stories told, with the position of the audience. Homotopic consensus,
referred to by Westphal, in which there is a risk of confusion between
the referent and its representation, is evidenced here through the figure
of the storyteller, present as a witness of the past and intervener in the
present.
We find, similarly, above all, the appreciation of the community and
its own space, of the family (most of the narratives, including the last
one, told by the storyteller himself, report families stories) and of the
population’s rural life; we still find allusions to the exploration of nature
as “poetical space”; apropos of the quietude of the transition of day to
night, it is said:
These are the best hours cut out for meditation, for longing or for love; the hours
of vague desires, of formless longings, of fantasies and building up; these are the
hours in which you carry something strange and superior to all that surrounds
us and with which we usually deal; in which the person suffers and enjoys, feels
and believes, has a good time and suffers; in which dismay and hope fight inside
ourselves.
[São essas as horas mais talhadas para a meditação, para a saudade ou para o
amor; são as horas das apirações vagas, dos desejos indefinidos, das fantasias e
das expansões; são as horas em que se leva em nós um não sei quê de estranho e
superior a tudo o que nos cerca e com que de hábito lidamos; em que o homem
sofre e goza, sente e crê, folga e padece; em que o desalento e a esperança se
travam em luta.] (Paganino, 2003:106)

As Hayden White argues, narrative is used as a form of teaching indi-

viduals to live in their real conditions of existence and as a way used
by the prevailing social groups to show social reality as an idealised
narrative. The short story titled “A Galinha da minha vizinha” is an
example of this:
André had never thought about the differences in this world, nor of the degrees of
rank. The fact that Mr. Manuel Fernandes was rich and that he worked for him and
was poor seemed to him as natural as going to bed at night and getting up at dawn.

180
 He had never considered these differences and worked every day with the hoe or
with the secateurs, as his father before him.
[André não pensara nunca nas diferenças deste mundo, nem nas gradações de
posição. Parecia-lhe tão natural o sr. Manuel Fernandes ser rico e ele trabalhar
para o sr. Manuel Fernandes e ser pobre, como deitar-se à noitinha e erguer-se de
madrugada. Nunca considerara nessas diferenças e ia trabalhando todos os dias,
com a enxada ou com a podadeira, como já o seu pai trabalhara.] (Ibid: 95)

The mental structure towards the world discussed by White is, thus
provided, step by step, through the elements mentioned. This world-
view is even visible in the type of title chosen for many works of this
period: Contos ao Luar (1861, Júlio César Machado), À Lareira (1872,
Júlio César Machado), Contos ao Soalheiro (1876, Augusto Sarmento),
Contos da Sesta (1870, Eduardo Augusto Vidal), in contrast with the
titles chosen by other writers such as, for example, the realist and natu-
ralist: Mulheres da Beira (1898, Abel Botelho), Arvoredos (1895, Teix-
eira de Queirós), Flor da Lama (1924, Eugénio Vieira).
Still from the perspective of the landscape marked by idealisation,
but already showing a clear difference as regards the former work, the
anthology Contos da Sesta (1870) by Eduardo Augusto Vidal deserves
to be highlighted here. It comprises two quite long narratives opening
and closing the volume, and by a central group titled “Histórias Camp-
esinas”, on which I will focus. It starts with an Introduction, in which
the author tries to explain his intention to the reader, reflecting on the
literary form chosen. Though he claims his model is Paganino (intertex-
tuality), if the introduction is analysed carefully, this is only partly true.
The narrator starts by saying that this is a modest, simple book that does
not try to solve the problems that afflict societies; he praises simplicity
and rest, and asserts his intention to delight the reader. He presents his
way of seeing the short story:
In this type of work, perfection is narrative. A short story is all in the way it is
narrated. We can do without the twists and turns; but the flow is imperative. It is
important not to dilute the style; but to present it easily imaginative. Some ara-
besques, a touch of mischief, communicative feeling, quickness, harmony; – these
are the main qualities of these small pictures; where domestic or public scenes, –
(very frequent), have no boastful aspirations to murals or muscle studies.

181
 [Neste género de trabalhos, a perfeição consiste na narrativa. Um conto está todo
no modo por que no-lo contam. Dispensam-se as peripécias; mas é impreterível
a fluência. Cumpre não diluir o estilo; mas apresentá-lo facilmente imaginoso.
Alguns arabescos, algum toque de malícia, sentimento comunicativo, rapidez, har-
monia; – eis as qualidades principais destes quadrinhos; onde as cenas domésticas
ou públicas, – (sempre recorrentes), não têm basófias de pinturas murais nem de
estudos de musculatura] (Vidal, 1870)19

After this, he defends “this type of literature which is more popular and
accessible” [“este género de literatura mais popular e mais acessível”]
(Vidal, 1870: Introd.), based on the modern democratic principles, on
the equality that modern societies claim. Art, that, in Vidal’s words,
is the Good, must also come down from its inaccessible heights and give
the simplest the opportunity, the access to its manifestations20. Let us
remember here Trindade’s study (cf. page 167) pointing up that in the
forties, the poor and simple were in fact illiterate, and in practice, the

19 Spelling updated.
20 “It is not possible to favour on one side the mob, the rabble, in a word, democracy –
it is not permissible to tell the obscure ditch worker, to the incipient artisan, to the
man of the crude hammer, that all caste distinctions are over, all the race distinc-
tions and that people can sit at will at the feast of power and glory – when you
deny them access to the sanctuary where the sublime deities preside […] Can vast
seas make fun of the humble brooks? – No and never.
Let them adorn themselves with the magnificence of their majesty, vaunt their
glorious galleons; but let them not despise the solitary trickle of water that will
provide water to the poor person’s vegetable garden”.
[“Não é possível favorecermos por um lado o populacho, a turba, a democracia,
enfim – não é lícito afirmar ao valador obscuro, ao artesano incipiente, ao homem
do camartelo rude, que se acabaram todas as gradações de castas, todas as dis-
tinções de raças, e que os homens podem sentar-se indiferentemente no banquete
do poderio e da glória – quando se lhes nega o ingresso no templo a que presidem
as divindades sublimes […] Poderão acaso os grandes mares chacotear dos ribei-
ros humildes? – Não e nunca.
Adornem-se aqueles com as pompas da sua magestade, blasonem dos seus
galeões soberbos; mas não desprezem o veio de água solitário que vai dessedentar
a hortazinha do pobre […]”]
(Vidal, 1870, Introdução)

182
target of these aesthetic concerns was the middle class21. Vidal’s Intro-
duction reflects the above duality and anticipates the strong conflicting
position in which the intellectual groups found themselves after 1880,
as will be seen ahead. Compare this narrator’s point of view with the
same type of reference made in the Introduction by Paganino. Here,
attention is drawn to “popular taste in literature”, but the approach that
intellectuals make of the rabble is valued, the effort to lead the uncouth
classes to understand their ideas, bestowing consolation and comfort:
“most holy press mission, how wonderful and venerable when it evan-
gelises the multitudes, consoling the wretched and comforting the dis-
couraged” [“sacrossanta missão da imprensa, como é admirável e ven-
eranda quando evangeliza as turbas, dando consolação ao desgraçado
e conforto ao que desanima”] (Paganino, 1861: 17). Vidal’s text main-
tains Paganino’s model, even if with less unity: there is also a narrator
who is external to the community, who tells some stories, an aged and
respected storyteller, Tomaz da Horta and an audience. However, the
approach to the subject reveals a much bigger distance from pedagogy
and Christian morality, in comparison with the one present in Pagani-
no’s text. In the short story “Para que serve o amor”, whose narrator is
not defined, the female character Mariana gets pregnant as a result of
her relationship with a nobleman; her boyfriend, Honório, after return-
ing from America, marries the girl. In the last paragraph, before the
voice that asks about the christening date, the narrative voice wonders:
“did our obscure redeemer act rightly or wrongly? It is not up to me to
decide. He was at peace with God, that is certain; but the brassiest, the
most mongrel, the most brilliant drunkard of that place occasionally
mocked him in passing. It is the lot of all redeemers to have someone
who writes on them, either on the cross or on the forehead” [“fizera
bem ou mal o nosso redentor obscuro? Não serei eu que o decida. Ele
estava em paz com Deus, é certo; mas o mais bargante, o mais chibarro,
o mais estanhado borrachão daquele sítio chacoteava-o de passagem.
É sina de todos os redentores o haver sempre alguém que lhes escreva
um rótulo, ou na cruz ou na testa”] (Vidal, 1870: 106). The question

21 On the history of reading see also Tengarrinha, 1983.

183
introduced at the end, questions not only Honório’s action but the whole
village’s evil-speaking; the final sentence separates the character’s deci-
sion from moral evaluation, making the community’s opinion relative.
“Um pobre de espírito”, in which we are before the story of a priest who
“had loved” (Ibid: 117), shows a change of perspective towards certain
social groups, mainly if we compare it with the priest’s character in
Paganino. However, at different times, the narrator reveals an aware-
ness of his distance in relation to the more traditional model of short
story and the desire, as in the first story mentioned, of remaining neutral
(multifocalization). This is what happens in “A medalha de fr. Jorge”
which starts as follows:
In those times there were still convents. Then came civilisation, progress, sublime
movement and the cloisters were swept of their centuries-old dust, and the friars’
dreary voices stopped psalming in the choir.
I do not cry, neither for that dust that is gone with the wind, nor for those echoes
that faded into silence.
But how many cells were there that were the refuge of tears? – how many breviary
sheets were not soaked with the sweat of agony?
The new generation only saw the brilliant fat neck of the St. Bernard friars spar-
kling and flung the harpoon at it as at a productive whale calf. […]
But what have I to do with it?
My story does not invade political regions, nor do I want to produce a chapter for
a book on the philosophy of history.
[Nesse tempo ainda havia conventos. Depois veio a civilização, o progresso, o
movimento sublime, e os claustros foram varridos da sua poeira secular, e as vozes
lúgubres dos frades deixaram de psalmear no coro.
Eu não choro nem por aquele pó que o vento levou, nem por aqueles ecos que
emudeceram.
Quantas celas não haveria porém que fossem refúgio de lágrimas? – quantas
folhas de breviário não se ensoparam com o suor da agonia?
A nova geração viu apenas luzir a nedia cachaceira dos bernardos, e atirou-lhe o
harpeu como a um baleote produtivo. […]
Mas o que tenho eu com isso?
O meu conto não invade as regiões da política, nem pretendo formar capítulo em
nenhum livro de filosofia de história.] (Vidal, 1870: 107–108)

It should be remembered that in May 1871 Antero gave a lecture on

“The Causes of the Decadence of the Peninsular Peoples” and that

184
anticlericalism was commonplace, vulgarising criticism against reli-
gion and the Roman Catholic Church. Besides, with Regeneration, the
policy of delivering the buildings of old congregations to local admin-
istration services, was kept up. Local councils used the premises of dis-
solved convents to house government departments. The same neutral
attitude from Vidal is visible in the short story “Filho és, pai serás”,
a love story between a young man and a young married woman who
is also a mother; in the end, the narrator says that the story, given its
insipid moral, will not please some people. And he reasserts: “I have
nothing to do with it. I am not here to preach to the godless, but even
less to sacrifice to their gods” [“Não tenho nada com isso. Eu não ando
aqui para missionar gentios, porém muito menos para imolar aos seus
deuses”] (Vidal, 1870: 137). It is interesting to compare this statement
to Paganino’s narrator praise of some writers’ effort to “evangelise the
multitudes” (Paganino, 2003: 17) through simple stories. We can under-
stand from these examples that, in the short regionalist narrative, the
narrators’ observation and point of view are essential elements in the
construction of social and ideological identities implied in the text.
As noted before, the point of view of the narrative voice defines
the choice of natural elements to structure as landscape such as, partly,
the construction of the characters. In this volume, different types of
landscape perception are noticed: one of them corresponds to the still
romantic, quiet and idyllic landscape, and is associated to the story-
teller, Tomás da Horta; in another one, landscape is used to explain and
supplement the characters’ presentation or the plot’s; and finally, in a
third type, comparisons and parallels with human beings are suggested:
The sun dived in the west and a playful fresh wind shook the trunks singing
sadly. The countryside overflowed with the evening’s melancholy that cannot be
described but that filters through the soul like a sorceress’s nectar. Tomás da Horta
contemplated the horizon fixedly, where strongly tinted clouds swung like violets.
Oh, spring is a conspiracy reinforced with flowers and balm, it is the traitor that
hides his dagger under a velvet cloak, it is the viper that crouches before the
wounded vineyards. We receive it, bare-chested we drink its aroma, inhaling
deeply and when we think we have fed ourselves with a lungful of life, we feel
sickness in our veins. If April talked it would tell me how many breasts the ground
has eaten, killed by the inebriation of its scents.

185
 The years really pass sidelong with life. A person has worm-eaten roots, as I do,
and from the sky falls a drop of water; other times summer is still far and you
starve through the devil’s doings.
[O sol atufava-se no poente e um vento fresco e travesso meneava os troncos can-
tarolando tristemente. O campo transbordava aquela melancolia do fim da tarde
que não se descreve, mas que se coa pela alma como um nectar de feiticeiras.
Tomás da Horta contemplava fixamente o horizonte, onde se balouçavam umas
nuvens retintas como violetas. (Vidal, 1870: 94)
Oh, a primavera é uma conspiração armada de flores e de bálsamos, é o traidor
que esconde o punhal sob o manto de veludo, é a víbora que se agacha perante
as murteiras feridas. Recebe-a a gente, bebe-lhe o aroma a peito descoberto, a
pulmão cheio e quando pensa ter-se alimentado com um sopro de vida, sente a
enfermidade nas veias. Se o mês de abril falasse, dir-me-ia quantos peitos come já
a terra, mortos pela embriaguez dos seus perfumes. (Vidal, 1870: 133)
Verdade seja que os anos andam de esguelha com a vida. Está uma pessoa com
as raízes carcomidas como eu as tenho, e sempre lhe cae do céu uma gotinha de
água; outras vezes ainda o estio lá vem em casa do Deus te salve, e morre-se à
míngua que nem por artes do demo.] (Vidal, 1870: 94)

In the second case, in the short story “Filho és, pai serás”, the par-
allel forwards the end of the characters’ connection and, in the third,
relative to the short story “Sob o Parreiral”, Joaninha’s death is men-
tioned. Other examples are the association of the sunset with Paulo’s
melancholy in the short story “Uma leitura ao sol posto”, or the parallel
between the year’s seasons and the maturity of Virginia in the short story
“A última rosa”. Landscape and the natural world are often used as a
model, the basic mould of live, which the characters echo; this is said
in different times by the narrator, as happens in the short story “Cousas
de Aldeia”, which starts with a digression on the temptation that the
tree, the scent of the flowers and the voluptuousness of the breeze can
bring22. The connection of the characters to the landscape, in this work,

22 “Let us start this narrative with a sincere confession – that the pine foliage does
not cover more innocent people than golden baldachins. The flesh is weak and
the seducer does not sleep. Besides, if we think about it carefully, when the snake
slobbered venom onto the pure soul of our first mother, it certainly twisted around
a tree. The scent of the flowers by itself often stuns the most severe conscience.
Add to this the mellifluous voices and the voluptuousness of the breeze and the
angels themselves will be weakened.” [“Comecemos esta narrativa por uma

186
is thus established, in a more direct form than in Paganino, but without
being “connected in essence” (Buescu, 1990: 138) to the natural world.
Hence, although it still starts in the model of storyteller/audience,
developing arabesques and relaxing pictures, the representation of real-
ity and the worldview that Vidal offers is much more transgressive than
Paganino’s had been, and above all the closures have no educational
concerns. And what was this reality? It was a transition period. The
Portuguese population remained mostly rural. In 1890, of the five mil-
lion inhabitants that made up the population of continental Portugal, the
urban population was only 15%, centering mostly in Lisbon and Porto.
To the city/country duality principle was added the duality of sociolog-
ical nature. The middle class, small in number and weak, comprised
small traders and shopkeepers and the small bourgeoisie of the clerks,
separated from the people by ignorance and penury. Together with
some cultural and technical progress, subsistence agriculture prevailed,
having as its basis the traditional cultures that guarantee self-sufficiency
to families23. The peasant repeated his tasks in a hard way, farming,
sowing, watering, harvesting and threshing, using old agricultural imple-
ments. Their everyday of work, affection, rivalries, pleasures, solidarity
and regrets was marked by a calendar in which religion, agriculture and
fiesta intertwined24. Emigration, mainly to Brazil, was common, but the
emigrants submitted to situations of great exploitation. On the other
hand, the 70s generation had become a critical conscience, appealing to
science as a factor for regeneration and social organization, and defend-
ing that Letters should stop being an excuse for the trifling delight of

confissão sincera – é que a ramagem dos pinheiros não cobre mais inocentes do
que os baldaquinos doirados. A carne é fraca e o tentador não adormece. Além
disso, se bem pensarmos no caso, quando a serpente babou peçonha na alma cân-
dida da nossa primeira mãe, é certo que se enroscou numa árvore. Só o cheiro das
flores atordoa muitas vezes as mais austeras consciências. Juntem a isto o melí-
fluo das vozes e o voluptuoso das brisas e têm deslombados os próprios anjos.”]
(Vidal, 1870: 85)
23 See Vaquinhas, 1993.
24 A good example of this atmosphere is Miguel Torga’s short story “A Festa”
(Torga, 1979).

187
the bourgeoisie, and become a source of national consciousness. At the
level of conformity with the referent it seems that, in Vidal’s text, is
present what Westphal calls a representation in “utopian excursus”, that
plays with the reader and with itself: by defending the end of class dis-
tinctions and access of the poorest to sublime worlds, narratives seemed
available to a peasant audience but that was not really true. After the
third quarter of the century, most of the narrators of regionalist short
stories lost this contact with the reader, and nature became a more inte-
grative part of the characters’ construction.

3.  Landscape marked by decadence

The British Ultimatum of 1890 created an enormous wave of patriotic

fervour, an unprecedented mobilisation of the masses that galvanised
the whole country. The Ultimatum crisis coincided or drew attention
to the weakness of institutions, to the instability of political life, finan-
cial problems, unemployment, problems of cereal production (Serrão,
1988). A wave of pessimism, fed by natural accidents and even by the
suicide of famous personalities, such as the writer Júlio César Mach-
ado, among whose works we find some regionalist short story volumes.
This critical pessimism, that prevailed in national literature between
1890 and 1910 and had Fialho de Almeida as one of its major figures,
partly coincided with literary naturalism and realism. The publication
of Palavras Loucas (1894), considered, as already noted, the manifesto
of Portuguese regionalism, would resume, through neo-Garretism, the
idealised gaze at the rural world, once more revealing a route made of
ambivalences, a route to be analysed and very strongly called into ques-
tion by Aquilino Ribeiro at the beginning of the twentieth century. In
the meantime, thanks to the demographic increase, as noted before, the
“people” affirmed their presence more and more whether in the cities or
in the villages. However, this affirmation had a paradoxical effect from
the point of view of the propagation of culture and reading. If, on the one

188
hand “the impulse to read was born in the opening up to new values and
concerns that spread in society”, on the other, “this impulse thus mate-
rialises in reading that is predominantly based on the traditional values
of Liberal society” (Tengarrinha, 1983: 236). That is, the lower social
strata, before the openness and debate assumed by the most avant-garde
groups, were interested in the cultural models of the dominant social
groups (Tengarrinha, 1983). Likewise, from a broader perspective, the
contradiction originates conservative answers: the heterogeneity of the
aforementioned reality, the economic and social conflicts, the change
in routines and society’s material basis (caused, for example, by the use
of the steam engine and of machinery in the growing industrial sector)
and unfitness to new ways of life or the loss of hopes, made way for
the idealization of the rural world and refuge in the primitivism of a
lost world (Costa Dias, 1977: 73); hence the coexistence of Palavras
Loucas’s neo-Garrettism and the naturalist perspective can be under-
stood. Costa Dias tries to explain ideologically the literary movement of
neo-Garrettism, in all its complexity and analyses the works of António
Nobre (Só) and Trindade Coelho, underlining the latter’s approaches
and differences in perspective. The landscape proposed here, accord-
ing to this critic, is constructed with elements of the poetic and fixed
atmosphere of childhood, in a world still made up of clergy, nobility
and people, without evidence of the industrialised and modern world
that dotted the country; the “sweet recollections” are crystallised, an
atmosphere of the “clay Christmas crib” is built, and the traditional and
patriarchal work atmosphere is validated; such a vision is rooted in a
folkloric symbolism originating in the mentality of the peasantry, par-
alysed by ignorance and impregnated with emotion (Costa Dias, 1977:
242–254)25. This nationalism that clearly refused historical becoming,

25 Costa Dias summarises the neo-Garrettist ideas as follows: What then does
Alberto de Oliveira propose to his youthful comrades .The neo-Garrettist ideas
can be summarised in these paragraphs: 1st Insurrection against the «exoticists»
who in this simple, charming country try to introduce the habit of literary dis-
eases and take to their bosom the rat of Neurosis, by which some elected souls
feel bitten, subjecting us by its impulse to the danger of causing the fall of all
our robust Art into insignificant pictures of this type ; 2nd Oppose to the petty

189
turning to radicalism and isolation, calls into question part of the value
of what it defends. Indeed, during the period under consideration, only
Trindade Coelho’s short narrative prose echoes some of these principles.
Although it is impossible to draw tight and precise defining lines
in all literature and even more, as emphasised, in regionalist literature,
it can be said that in most of the short narratives of this type published
between 1880 and 1910 the narrator, described in the model referred to
above, tends to lose contact with his reader; nature is still a space uncor-
rupted by civilisation, but the living conditions of his characters are
subject to “unveiling” or “unblinding” (Viçoso, 2011: 40), seeking to
explore the symbolism of landscape according to this new perspective
and this new feeling; Fialho, as I have already said, mirrors quite well

and marketable inferiority of importing other peoples’ false Catholicism, their

literary diabolism, their hallucination created by reading and by an intense cer-
ebral living, in a horrible environment where it is cold, there is crime, Misery
and the whole World that does not care – a real poetic horizon full of the charm
of vanishing gold and worn out velvet […] and our poetic traditions, which we
do have, coming from the People, of a very rich carat; 3rd Giving as fodder to
fantasy (Come on Poets, head off the watchful eyes of your fantasy!), landscapes
to be seen, traditions and legends to dust from neglect […], a charming, strong
language, with Portuguese soul, with Portuguese picturesque, with nostalgia and
melancholy that have always been our character; or else the authentic qualities
of our superstitious and mystical people, full of diabolical and sadistic leanings
[…] and hysterical cases full of details, there being villages in Portugal with
families of typical and unusual lunatics; or even the songs of the women who beat
the linen on our farm, the ballads invoked by our Grandmother, from which rises
the flavour of poetry, religion, sweetness and grace that must anoint our poets’
ballads; 4th To stimulate inspiration in the intense vision of what we were: rap-
turous chivalries of our Grandfathers […], India full of dream, etc; 5th In brief,
putting into practice as Garrett dreamed, with the gaze of the genius, a thriving,
new Portuguese literature, all of it returning to traditions, with the melancholy
and the marvelous nature of the people […] and follow in the inexhaustible Frei
Luís de Sousa’s footsteps the fine talent that evokes our old furniture and court
magnificence like the picturesque of our landscape and of our ages-old literature
is employed without a loan from strangers, and as through all the Garrettian work
revolves, as in arteries, the blood of our race, its fatalism, its sensuality in love, its
spiritual and naïve passion for Adventure and Chivalry”
(Costa Dias, 1977: 295–297; in italics Palavras Loucas, pp. 29–36).

190
all the pessimistic atmosphere described beforehand; in the narratives
and chronicles he materialises his vision of the decadence of the “race”,
the subservience and ignorance of the working classes or the infection
of the rural population by city vices26; the thorough analysis he makes
is, of course, a result of his own condition as an avant-garde thinker
and aesthete; it reflects the complexity of cultural identities and real
conditions involved in the production and consumption of regionalist
literature.
The short stories in focus in connection with this period are “Pas-
toral” (Teixeira de Queirós), “A Frecha da Misarela” (Abel Botelho) and
“À hora de vésperas” (Aquilino Ribeiro). “Pastoral” (1889) by Teixeira
de Queirós shows a very different relationship between characters and
landscape, from the previous short stories. An episode between three
shepherds, developed between pastures and rocks, is related. Russo’s
jealousy towards the lovers and Tonia’s hostility, lead him to push the
hanging stone, a famous rock in the region, because of its unstable posi-
tion. The rock kills the lovers, falling on them. In the Introduction, titled
“The reason of my work” (third edition of Os meus primeiros contos
(1914), Teixeira de Queirós expresses his admiration for Balzac and

26 See Verdelho da Costa, 2004. See the following excerpt from Gatos 4: “All of
you know the nature and social conditions of the poor populations of Beira Baixa.
Apart from specific exceptions, it is a penurious race bowed under by superstition
and ignorance, eating badly, living in filth and maintaining in the face of rich
people’s money a slave’s and starving dog’s servility. Up to Castelo Branco the
landscape is horrible, full of cistus and short bushes, cork trees, some occasional
chestnut tree in the ravine’s margin, the exiguous plants, some olive groves and
grain harvests every two years, in the craggy steppes, deserted and barren as an
Arabia full of anathemas”.
[“Conhecem todos a índole e condições sociais da gente pobre da Beira Baixa.
Salvo excepções restritas, é uma raça de miséria, avergoada de superstições e de
ignorância, comendo mal, vivendo imundo, e guardando ao dinheiro dos ricos
uma servilidade de escravos e cães esfomeados. Até Castelo Branco a paisagem
é horrível, cheia de estevas e mato curto, sobreiros, algum castanheiro raro na
margem dos barrancos, as plantas exíguas, algum olival, e searas de dois em dois
anos, na terra roçada das estepes, desertas e estéreis como uma Arábia silvada de
anátemas”.] (Almeida, 1992.2: 198)

191
Flaubert, his belief in the use of the method of exact observation to
study social phenomena, defending that the social value of the novel is
enormous, and that art should be morally and religiously neutral, to look
for the simple truth (intertextuality)27. However, in the Introduction to
Arvoredos (1895), published before the volume of this short story, the
author states that the book was written “from the heart and with feel-
ing”, thus moving away from concerns of analysis and giving himself
over to the somewhat lyrical evocation of Minho landscapes and types.
“Pastoral” fits into this phase28, but presents a different perspective from
the previous ones (Paganino and Vidal) that will condition another type
of connection between the characters and the physical world that sur-
rounds them. Natural landscape is here a determining element in the
short story structure and in the tragic effect that is constructed. There
are no references to the city and very little intrusion from the narrator,

27 “I spent the first phase of my dreamed creation, as I said, rambling around the
Minho landscape. From there I took some of the elements with which I have
composed Comédia do Campo. I then found myself studying the natural sciences,
where I was taught the exact method of observation and comparison that is
employed in them to come nearer to the coveted certainty. I felt comfortable, sup-
ported by this lever for the study of social phenomena. […] As to the social value
of the current novel I think it is enormous. All art is educational in and of itself. It
is enough to contemplate harmonious beauty to better our soul. For this it should
be neutral in moral and religious matters and look only for the simple truth”.
[A primeira fase da minha criação sonhada passei-a como disse, divagando por
entre a paisagem minhota. Daqui tiraria alguns dos elementos com que tenho
composto a Comédia do Campo. Encontrei-me, depois, no estudo das ciências
da natureza, onde me ensinaram o exacto método de observação e comparação,
que nelas se emprega para nos aproximarmos da cobiçada certeza. Senti-me bem,
apoiado nessa alavanca para o estudo dos fenómenos sociais. […] Quanto ao
valor social do romance actual entendo que é enorme. Toda a arte é de si educa-
tiva. Para isso basta a contemplação da beleza eurítmica para melhorar a nossa
alma. Para isso deverá ser neutra em moral e em religião e buscar apenas a ver-
dade simples.] (Queirós, 1914: X-XIV).
28 As António Saraiva and Óscar Lopes state, in the last volumes of Comédia do
Campo, Queirós praises rural simplicity and contact with nature (Saraiva and
Lopes, n.d.: 933). “Pastoral” was published in Revista de Portugal. It would then
be included in the anthology A nossa gente (1899). The edition used for this work
is the anthology compiled by Ana Costa Lopes, 1990 (pp. 69–77).

192
with the exception of a few commentaries near the end about Russo
and bemoaning “the wretched lovers” [“os desgraçados amantes”]
(Queirós, 1990: 77) and, of course, the omniscient description through
which the narrator’s position towards the characters is visible. There is,
from the beginning, a strong connection between these and the physical
world that surrounds them, and this will build up, in the end, almost
to an assimilation between its characteristics and the characters’. The
description of the good quality of Guidon pasture and of “the moun-
tain’s supreme muteness” [“suprema mudez da serra”] links up with the
sheperdess’s expectation of love – “at such moments the imagination
runs faster […] the heart beats strong and quick” [“em tais momentos
acelera-se a imaginação […] o coração bate forte e rápido”] (Ibid: 69);
the evocation of the Biblical image of the Samaritan woman, quenching
the thirst of the peaceful Nazarene (Ibid: 75), suggests the integration of
the shepherds in the landscape and their bonding with it; in opposition,
the crude and instinctive reaction they cause in Russo, is embedded in
the fierce rocks that surround them. Queirós’ images, comparisons and
metaphors reveal the recurrent use of anthropomorphism and personi-
fication:
From the age of fifteen, still that girl’s body was like a new chestnut tree, he always
saw her in the transparency of the autumn moon. The granitic bulk eternally sus-
pended from the pinnacle and parched by the sun of an endless August would
not be more firm or more arm than he. The jealousy in his body was a hidden,
slow grinding, like a fire that smoulders in the earth under the hidden heather, to
transform it into coal. Condemned by that constant repulsion, he felt contemptible
and desired a death that would make him suffer much. However, he could not
detach his own life from that unfortunate dream. In Tonia’s presence, his choleric
and redheaded nature was turning blonde in smooth and gentle shades. The most
tender lamb of his sheep had not, for those who suckled it, such tenderness and
gratitude, as he showed that girl in a submission of something brutish (emphasis
added).
[Desde os quinze anos, ainda aquele corpo de rapariga era como um castanheiro
novo, já ele a via constantemente na transparência dos luares outonais. As moles
graníticas penduradas eternamente nos píncaros, e ressequidas pelo sol dum
infindável Agosto, não teriam mais firmeza nem mais calor do que ele. O ciúme
era no seu corpo um moer lento e oculto, tal fogo que mina a urze escondida na
terra, para a transformar em carvão. Condenado por aquela repulsa constante,

193
 sentia-se desprezível e desejava a morte, em que sofresse muito. Contudo não
podia despegar a própria vida daquele sonho mal aventurado. Em presença da
Tónia, a natureza ruiva e colérica, aloirava-se nuns cambiantes meigos e suaves.
O mais terno anho das suas ovelhas, não tinha, para quem o aleitava, tanto carinho
e agradecimento, como ele mostrava àquela rapariga numa submissão de coisa
bruta.] (Ibid: 70, ênfase meu).

The “Pedra Suspensa” [Hanging Rock] is the object of popular mythi-

fication associated to divine power and to the ancestry of origins, also
becoming a “menace to sinners” (Ibid: 71) and the object of penance;
the saying went that it had been planted there by an “evil genie and ugly
giant” [“mau génio e feio gigante”] – a description that is very close
to Russo’s – and that its fall, a symbol of divine anger, would mark the
beginning of the end of the world. It is also a “boulder” [“pedregulho”]
(Ibid: 72), used by Tónia to attack Russo, angry at his threat to topple
the stone, which would end everybody’s world. In this excerpt, as in
the denouement, the instinctive and rough nature of the characters can
be understood, such as the habit of resorting to violence as a means of
conflict resolution.
While Russo watches over the flocks, Tónia meets Chico, and the
landscape is used, once more, to build the detail of the action that will
have a marked effect in Russo:
To climb the cliff, where the music player was and pluck him from there, she had
trouble. The stone was flat and her clog treads were worn away. But she grabbed
onto an oak branch, bent forward…The magnificent, powerful hips curved in the
arc of a fecund and complete woman, created along the rocky paths. As Chico saw
her trying to climb, he dropped his flute, holding her by her plump arms.]
[ Para subir ao penedo, onde estava o tocador e arrancá-lo dali, teve dificuldades.
A pedra era lisa e as tacholas dos socos estavam gastas. Mas agarrou-se a um ramo
de carvalho, inclinou-se para diante… Os magníficos e potentes quadris arqueram-
se numa curva de mulher completa e fecunda, criada nos caminhos pedregosos.
O Chico, vendo-a no empenho de subir, largou a flauta, tomando-a pelos braços
roliços.] (Ibid: 73)

From this moment on, Russo’s anger and jealousy increase and he
decides to topple the stone. His physical strength, madness and demonic
characteristics are contrasted with Chico’s delicacy and creativity; both

194
are compared to different animals and plants by the girl; Russo is a
“jealous and raging billy-goat” [“bode raivoso e ciumento”], a “wild
pig” [“porco bravo”], Chico is “tender and shy as a one month old
goat-kid” [“tímido e meigo como um cabrito dum mês”], Russo is “a
harsh bramble that ripped flesh” [“escambroeiro áspero que rasgava as
carnes”], Chico “a genista branch, flexible, fragrant, beautiful” [“ramo
de giesta, belo, cheiroso, flexível”] (Ibid: 74). The two last parts of the
short story are the climax of Russo’s identification with the landscape
and the evil forces, impiety and vengeance taught by religion and jeal-
ousy (Ibid: 75). Here Teixeira de Queirós explores religion and popu-
lar expressions of religiosity and beliefs to produce the dramatic final
effect; this is revealed by expressions such as: ” from the mysterious
depth [of the earth] infernal words came to him” [“do fundo misterioso
[da terra] vinham-lhe palavras infernais”]; “dark blossoms” [“florescên-
cias tenebrosas”]; “a violent quaking roared in the heart of the moun-
tain” [“um violento frémito rugia no interior da montanha”]; “a tiger’s
feelings” [“sentimentos de tigre”]; “a gale drove him through the air”
[“uma força de vendaval levava-o pelo ar”]; “the superstitious mountain
faith” [“a fé supersticiosa das montanhas”] (Ibid: 75–76). In the end,
after thrusting the stone off its perch, the narrator describes the fusion
between the landscape and the images of a great fire that rises up from
the dark, in which diabolical figures, present in Russo’s mind, intersect;
he finally throws himself “into space like a vulture […] smashing his
flesh and bones” [“ao espaço como um abutre […] esmagando-se-lhe
as carnes e os ossos”] (Ibid: 76). The reference to blood, that dyes the
surrounding grass red, amplifies the dramatic effect, once more assimi-
lating the landscape and characters. Natural and animal landscapes are
the last characters on the scene. The three last paragraphs describe the
following Spring morning, quiet and opulent in light, plants, mountains,
lakes, herds, the valleys, the mountain pride and the “pathetic tranquility
of natural life” [“tranquilidade patética da vida natural”]. Only Tónia’s
mongrel dog cries for its owner.

195
 Abel Botelho (1854–1917), in “A Frecha da Misarela” (1898)29,
builds the relationship of landscape with narrative in yet another way.
This is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl baker, with a miserly, cynical
father and madly loved by a shepherd. After having given herself to a
nobleman, rejecting the shepherd, she repents and is forgiven by him,
not without a first aggressive reaction. When he looks for her, regretful
and willing to accept her, he finds the girl on the edge of the Misarela
waterfall, into which she will leap, saying she feels dirty for him. As to
point of view, the narrator, although not being the friendly narrator who
addresses the reader, emphasising the relaxed feature of his narratives,
is not absent; on the contrary, he comments, takes a stand, denounces,
criticises:
And it really is a treasure, that valley! […] And what a beautiful image that of the
herd! […]
The ‘green’ that covers the cloddish mountains is not that of the pestiferous
modern rottenness, but that of oxygenated hope […] That seductive whore – Civil-
isation – does not yet have macadam roads that might carry it? to corrupt the
mountains […]
It is not rare to see in the province these revolting specimens of the filth and clogs
of the conquerors, a kind of low level pasha, perhaps a trace of the Muslim dom-
ination of the country. […].
[E é realmente um tesouro aquele vale! […] E que belo quadro o do rebanho! […]
O ‘verde’ que cobre os serros alpestres, não é o das pestilentas podridões modernas,
mas sim o da oxigenada esperança […] Essa meretriz sedutora – a Civilização –
ainda não tem estradas a macadame que a conduzam a perverter os montes […]
Não são raros pela província estes exemplares repugnantes de conquistadores do
surro e do tamanco, espécie de paxás de baixa estofa, porventura resquício ainda
da dominação muçulmana no País. […]] (Botelho, 2000: 147;149;150; 157)

It is from this narrator’s perspective that a clear distinction is made

between the pure country landscape and the city corruption that infects
Ana’s father, leading him to impel his daughter to “mirages of other

29 Botelho, 1989, “A Frecha da Misarela”. In Mulheres da Beira. Lisboa: Libânio

e Cunha. 1–36. Reprinted in Jesus, M., ed, 2000, Antologia do Conto Realista
e Naturalista. Porto: Campo das Letras. 146–166. The quotations refer to this
edition.

196
happiness” [“outras miragens de felicidade”] (Ibid: 154). The landscape
is described with high photographic and geographic accuracy, reveal-
ing, through flora and orography details, the author’s knowledge and
his need to establish a contrast between these realities. The first twelve
paragraphs are a good example but also the description of Ana’s house.
The reader’s attention is drawn to: “the visitor’s burning desire to merge
with such a free and robust nature”, “the harsh atmosphere of the adja-
cent mountains” “and the oasis in which the girl baker had grown up”
[“o desejo ardente [do visitante] de se confundir com aquela natureza
tão livre e tão robusta”, “o ambiente agreste das serras adjacentes”
“e o ‘oásis’ em que a padeirinha fora criada” (Ibid: 147; 148; 152)].
In the final part, in which the characters draw closer to the waterfall,
surrounded by wild rocks, the landscape, always described in detail,
becomes “barren and sad” [“árida e triste”], “fearful and mountain-
ous” [“temerosa e alpestre”] (Ibid: 154), “hideous and lugubrious”
[“medonha e lúgubre”] but “of an incomparable, harsh beauty” [“de
uma beleza agreste incomparável”] (Ibid: 165). The landscape does not
reflect the characters’ states of mind but is shown in all its contrasts, in
an innocence that distances it from the city’s corruption. The betrayal
of society’s negative aspects, characteristic of the naturalist creed and
the revelation of the characters’ evolution, shaped somewhat determin-
istically by the environment and by education, in a sense makes the
characters independent of the rural, physical landscape. Yet, this is not
the idealised landscape of the previous phase. Faithful to the intention
of depicting reality, Botelho cannot help referring to the poverty of the
characters: the shepherd’s “impoverished, deficiency of nourishment”
[“depauperada deficiência da alimentação”], the “rough zaragoza cloth
trousers” [“as toscas calças de saragoça”] (Ibid:149; 150), the “pigsty
that did as a bedroom” [“pocilga que servia de quarto”] to Ana, the
admiration for “the gently-born who would not go barefoot showing
black, cracked feet” [“fidalgos que não andariam descalços a mostrar
uns pés gretados e negros”] as happens with André (Ibid: 154; 153).
Simultaneously, confinement to this natural and primitive landscape,
to a “lonely and sad” life [“tristonha e só”] (Ibid: 152), that briefly
triggers romantic and decadent nuances in the character construction

197
(“the sweetest charm that lived in André’s soul; his thoughts as white
as sheep’s wool”; “the corpse of that martyred woman” [“o suavíssimo
encanto que vivia na alma de André”, “os seus pensamentos alvos como
a lã das ovelhas”, “o cadáver daquela mártir” (Ibid:150; 166)]) is what
arouses in Ana the desire to know the world, the wonders of Porto and
Arouca, the glamour of a different life, consumed by “hazy desires”
[“vagos desejos”] (Ibid:155) that she cannot explain. After all, Abel
Botelho deals with the regional question as, in his novels (he published
only this short story volume) he deals with social pathology.
When discussing nature and regionalism, Aquilino Ribeiro’s
(1885–1963) work is unavoidable but it is also, as with all the great
authors, impossible to catalogue under a specific classification. He con-
sidered and discussed the concept in a number of prefaces and articles;
however, such observations reveal that in the originality of his writing,
he was never conditioned by the questions raised by the subject. Two
of the most important topics referred to by Aquilino are language and
the analytic aspect. In the preface to the novel Terras do Demo (1918),
the author explains that regionalist literature is an art of contraction,
in which the author has to inhibit his spirit and his analysis to render
the local truth as faithfully as possible; to achieve it, it is necessary to
return to basics, to popular speech, as it is in the village that the pure
idiom dwells, which will renew the Language; the first characteristic
is the sin of regionalist art but the second is its rescuer30. The writer

30 “If, when browsing, these pages smell of furze and borrel, oiled when it returns
from being stomped, I will have achieved my purpose: getting art down over
the fragrant, rough, sincere mountain, and, in a way, activate the separation
between our Language and that Frenchified, denationalised literature everything
is crammed with. […] The mountain village, like the one I was baptized and
grew up in, healthy and strong is precisely this: noisy, courageous, dirty, sensual,
stingy, honorable, with all the feelings and instincts that formed the cobbles of
the old commune. […] In such primitive conditions, the pen describes, but would
become ridiculous if it analysed. To present the local truth the writer has to leave
the learned language he had created, Arcadians, preachers and deadly Gongoric
bards […] It seems to me, however, that this literature is a necessity, it corre-
sponds to picking at the source, renovating the vein of the language, corrupted by
other languages”.

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reveals the same opinion in the Preface to Andam Faunos pelos Bosques
(1926): “if being a regionalist is to give the means and companion-
ship in their lexical modality, the descent of the writer, depersonalising
himself, to reproduction and not to interpretation, the title suits me for
only two or three hundred pages of half a dozen books I have writ-
ten” [“se ser regionalista é dar o meio e a comparsaria na sua modal-
idade léxica, descer o escritor, despersonalizando-se, à reprodução e
não interpretação, só me convém o título para duas ou três centenas de
páginas de meia dúzia de livros que escrevi”] (Ribeiro, 1983a :8). In
Abóboras no Telhado (1955), Aquilino comes back to the same ques-
tion, this time at a greater distance. He considers that regionalist liter-
ature in his technique may be out of fashion, and explains the skillful
side of the process; if the author is asked to depersonalise himself, the
“singularity of resonance”, that defines the beauty of art, is lost; and,
even if that were possible the psychological fineness, metaphysics, do
not touch the “rural companionship”; spiritual problems are reduced,
for country people, to ancestrally established religious norms. As for
the local language, the central characteristic of the regionalist school,
Aquilino thinks that Portuguese, given the territory’s small dimensions,
is unique and uniform, ageographical; however, he reinforces its impor-
tance; he will end by saying that despite regionalism’s drawbacks, this
tendency helped to recover the Portuguese language and brought back
the exploration of scorned themes of provincial and rural life (Ribeiro,
1955: 71–82). In Solilóquio Autobiográfico (Ribeiro, 1977), Aquilino

[“Se ao folhear, estas páginas rescenderem ao tojo e ao burel azeitado quando

torna dos pisões, terei satisfeito o meu propósito: descer a arte sobre a bronca,
fragrante e sincera serra, e, em certa medida, activar o desquite entre a nossa
Língua e essa literatura desnacionalizada, francizante de que se atulha a praça.
[…] A aldeia serrana, como aquela em que fui nado e baptizado e me criei são
e escorreito, é assim mesmo: barulhenta, valerosa, suja, sensual, avara, honrada,
com todos os sentimentos e instintos que constituíam o empedrado da comuna
antiga. […] Em tais condições de primitividade, a pena descreve, mas tornar-se-ia
ridícula, analisando. Para dar a verdade local tem de abstrair da linguagem erudita
que forjara, árcades, pregadores e gongóricos vates de má morte […] Parece-me
que esta literatura, porém, é uma necessidade, corresponde a picar na nascente,
renovar o veio da Língua viciado por outras línguas.”] (Ribeiro, 1983b: 6–8)

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reinforces this idea, emphasising that one should put an end to the
unjustified idea that there is a regionalist school in Portugal, because
there are only actors who change backstage. “Abel Botelho in Beiras,
Camilo in Minho, in the Alentejo Fialho and Brito Camacho are suits
of the same literary pack of cards” [“Abel Botelho nas Beiras, Camilo
no Minho, no Alentejo Fialho e Brito Camacho são naipes do mesmo
baralho literário”] (Ribeiro, 1977:87). We thus return, through another
way, to the question of the writer/author’s position, reflected in the first
texts mentioned, from the perspective of the storyteller. Regionalist
short prose narratives frequently enter into a conflict with the entities
involved with them: the public for whom they are intended and the
people whom they address; the writer who must depersonalise himself
and the writer who must be singular; the narrator who does not want to
take sides and the narrator who wants to denounce; complex themes and
the simplicity of rural subjects (multifocalization). Form, the brevity
of the short story, its popular origin and the association to notions of
entertainment underline these ambiguities. The period in focus reveals
it; to the two tendencies considered can be added Aquilino’s very par-
ticular form of giving voice to the rural world. The short story “À hora
de vésperas” is included in Jardim das Tormentas (1913), the first pub-
lished book that the author considered his programme of themes to
survey. There is no thematic unity in the stories, and narratorial remarks
to further the narratives do not exist. Of the eleven stories, four are
focused on the rural landscape – the same space and the fixedness of
some characters. “À hora das vésperas” tells the story of a poor mule-
teer, Isidro, who lives maritally with his sister-in-law, Rosária, having
become a widower. Both are marginalised in the church and in village
affairs; one day, the mules break free and destroy a tilled field, and the
muleteer is convicted in court. To pay for the damage he has to sell one
of the mules, which he and his wife deeply regret. Later, he becomes
involved in a fight because of this animal and is stabbed. On his death
bed, the priest insists that he denies his common-law wife. Isidro will
not do it and finally dies. In this short story, the animal and physical
landscape are integrated in the characters’ daily life; the landscape is
not highlighted, but is always present in the routines, in the pauses, in

200
the animals’ behaviour. “Fruition as a source of beauty and harmony has
no place in the rough mountain world of Aquilino except when the nar-
rator speaks for himself or when he looks at the world from the perspec-
tive of the animals or the ‘civilised’” (Coelho, 1973: 153). We could say
that in Aquilino, nature is landscape only for a few moments, because
nature is very frequently featured with a soul and men, with animal
characteristics. The gaze of animal characters finds itself in an inter-
mediate space between both realities (multifocalization). In Abóboras
no Telhado, Aquilino says “Fialho interpreted nature as a scenic decor
for his prosopopoeia. As for me, since beings and things were subsid-
iary to each other, Libório Barradas would be a deus ex machine only
for psychological convenience. In everything else, I have integrated it
with birds, animals, horizons, good and evil in the planisphere” [“Fialho
interpretou a natureza como um decoro cénico para as suas prosopo-
peias. Quanto a mim, pois que seres e coisas eram subsidiárias umas das
outras, Libório Barradas apenas por comodidade psicológica seria um
deus ex machina. No mais, integrei-o com pássaros, bichos, horizontes,
bem e mal no planisfério”] (Ribeiro, 1955: 31) (stratigraphy).
Life is total, and the author, through a traditional narrator, seeks to
show its simultaneous tremor at all levels, in a sensation of background
movement that follows what is happening to the characters on stage;
it is said that, after five years, Isidro and Rosária had “three children,
the four walls of their house and a couple of male mules” (Ribeiro,
1984:131). Rosária goes to church after milking the cow (Idem). The
landscape description is made in the first narrative sequence, in three
phases, when Isidro returns to the village with the mules, after having
gone to the village to fetch Isaac Claro: first, the lowlands and the
potato fields are described, then the hill is described nearer the village,
the flocks and the shepherds, and finally, their arrival in the village; the
reader is therefore guided to visualise all the evolution of the human
and physical landscape:
The path broadened idly and they made the animals walk because the sun was
going down on the horizon. Already, purple swathes of clouds encircled it and car-
ried it to burial in the sea. The hill exhaled May; goats, motionless in the middle of

201
 the herds, brooded; young shepherds sitting on a wall, their legs dangling, played
their off-tune melodies on flutes.
[…] The sun plunged behind the hills. Under the muleteer’s whip the animals
hastened their trotting. Beyond the oak trees, an angle of the village appeared,
black and dirty. Two beggars, satchels over their shoulders, came along the way,
sharing bread and chewing, their mouths twisting to take advantage of their rotten,
uneven stumps.]
[O caminho dilatava-se indolentemente, e tocaram as bestas, que o sol descia
no horizonte. Já lençois roxos de nuvens, cingindo-o por todos os lados, o leva-
vam a sepultar no mar. O monte rescendia do maio; cabras, imóveis no meio dos
rebanhos, cismavam; pastorinhos sentados em cima duma parede, com as pernas
a bater, tangiam na frauta a sua modinha desafinada.
[…] O sol mergulhava por detrás dos montes. Sob a chibata do almocreve, as
bestas aceleraram o chouto. Para lá das carvalheiras, negro e sujo, mostrou-se um
cotovelo do povo. Dois mendigos, de bornal ao ombro, vinham pelo caminho fora
repartindo o pão e rilhando, boca torcida a aproveitar as arnelas podres e desen-
contradas.] (Ribeiro, 1984: 134–135)

Physical space and temporality are articulated with each other (Warf,
2008) and with individuals and animals. Maria de Nazaré Matos points
out Aquilino’s attempt to create the sensation of imutability and con-
tinuity, bringing an emotional and suggestive content to these spaces
(Matos, 2010). In the third sequence, in which the mule is sold, the
author uses the animals and their point of view (personification) for the
same purpose – through them he talks about the villages, about Isidro’s
characteristics, about the vitality of nature and the world, showing the
connection between all these elements:
After so much walking around, they were familiar with roads, paths and shortcuts,
farms and farmhouses, rocks and woods. Their eyes learned everything and by
them they told everything to nature and told each other, not to men, who were not
simple and shrewd enough to understand them.
[…] At that moment, coming down the mountain, the rough happiness of the
world continued in their souls. Their eyes remembered that familiar scenery, with
the rose-tinted sun crumbling in gold in the quiet air, from the bemused crowd of
pines to the truce of the battling rocks. Far away, on the horizon, the invariable,
dark mountain rested, its white tops decorated by the sun. And, as in all afternoons
pliant with blue, the big mysterious ridge seemed very near.
[À força de bater as cercanias, haviam-se familiarizado com estradas, caminhos
e atalhos, quintas e casais, penhas e florestas. Tudo aprendiam os seus olhos e

202
 mediante eles, tudo contavam à natureza e se contavam uns aos outros, nanja aos
homens, que não eram bastantes simples ou sagazes para os compreender.
[…] Naquele momento, descendo a serra, continuava-se em suas almas a rude
alegria do mundo. Os olhos iam-se-lhes recordando daquele cenário familiar, com
a rosa do sol a esfarelar-se em oiro no ar tranquilo, desde a multidão estarre-
cida dos pinheiros até a trégua dos penedos batalhantes. Lá longe, no horizonte, a
invariável mole sombria, com as cristas de neve damasquinadas de sol, repousava.
E, como em todas as tardes elásticas de azul, parecia-lhes próxima a grande cor-
dilheira misteriosa.] (Ribeiro, 1984: 140 e 142)31

This connection between all beings and nature is also present in what
the mules say to each other through their gaze, and in the use of typi-
cal animal vocabulary to describe the children: the “three children […]
with washed muzzles”, “the children howled” [“três pequenos […] de
focinho lavado”; “os pequenos ganiam”] (Ribeiro, 1984:149 and 153).
Similarly, in the last part, Aquilino contrasts the silence of the rustic
world with the characters’ sensitiveness: “the parochial rattle that inces-
santly sounded” [“matraca paroquial que soava incessantemente”], the
priest thinking of the “linen scent” [“perfume do linho”] and with the
“hens that awoke all a-flutter” [“galinhas que se levantavam alvoroça-
das”] (Ribeiro, 1984: 149); the dying muleteer moves restlessly under
the blankets without knowing how to answer the priest, and at the same
time “a beam of sun gilded the soot of the front door […] coming from
above it crossed the air like a golden spear” [“uma nesga de sol doirava
a fuligem do frontal […] vinda de cima atravessava o ar como uma
lança de oiro”] (Ribeiro, 1984:152) (polysensoriality).
Óscar Lopes synthesises the meaning of rurality in Aquilino, con-
trasting it with the “utopian ruralisms” of previous periods, that pre-
sented a more indirect sense of nature to be reconstructed by poets and
artists; Aquilino brings a “poetics of reconciliation” in the experien-
tial sense, a reconciliation of the earth with animals and people, one

31 Matos summarises this situation as follows: “This is Aquilino’s Beira. The ani-
mism of nature under the effects of sunlight is achieved through the gaze of the
animals and reflects a pervasive interaction between them and space, because
their blood is ‘animated’ by the luxuriant health of the land”.
(Matos, 2010: 46)

203
could say, of geography with human landscape. The style of this “recov-
ery-creation of nature” is bright, shiny, warm, assertive, but at the same
time, tragic. Aquilino shows the nuances, shades and dimnesses of the
social and human story, its hypocrisies, sickness and violence (Lopes,
2002b: 114–117). Following this concern, it makes sense to under-
stand the relationship of his writing, the way he sees landscape with
his perspectives on the local and national question, to understand, after
all, how his ideology was reflected in his writing. The physical space
where physical characteristics are connected to social ones is depicted
by Aquilino in an ambivalent way: it is on the one hand a fascinating
world, of contact with nature and animals, on the other the limited uni-
verse, poor and uneventful, from which Aquilino was already distant.
Behind his words, we find the idea of an “egalitarian primitive com-
munism” and the awareness of “inequality as a source of iniquity”; at
the same time the writer faces “the people as a genuine representative of
national specificity” (Sobral, 2002: 10–21), an idea already developed
in Herder, whom Aquilino quotes, and that is fostered by republican-
ism and ethnography. For Aquilino, “the articulation between national
and regional” is a treasured idea, and he would like to “nationalise the
novel going back to the purifying sources, using very Portuguese land”
(Ribeiro, 1955: 72). The ethnic and racial question is also fairly present,
but again in an ambivalent way: on the one hand, a critique about the
Seara Nova national myths, on the other, the relevance given to race32.
The ambivalent position of regionalist narrative in Aquilino derived
from the rootedness of the writer in the societies that marked his life,
and of the cultural and identity tendencies of the time in which he lived
(Sobral, 2002: 10–21).
This ambivalence will partly crumble with the neo-Realist short
story.

32 It should be remarked that Portuguese dictatorships frequently referred to its

people, as a race.

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4.  The landscape marked by oppression and rebellion

Neo-Realism, launched in the 1930s, inherited and kept many of the

traits of realism and naturalism, yet it essentially sought to denounce
and expose the social relations and living conditions of the peasants,
demystifying the previous appeasing and redemptive symbolism, and
showing from the Marxist perspective, that the possibilities of eman-
cipation and transformation are in the hands of popular actors. To this
new look at reality, several factors contributed: the under consumption
world crisis initiated in 1929, the problem of the Spanish Civil War and
the rise of fascism in Italy and of Nazism in Germany, the development
of sociology through authors like G. Friedman and H. Lefebvre, the
influence of the literary atmosphere of the League of American Writers
and the Brazilian “romance do nordeste” [Novel of the North-East];
in Portugal the effects of the consolidation of the repressive structure
of dictatorship. The Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional [Secretariat
for National Propaganda] was created in 1933 and an “agrarian, con-
servative and ideological discourse about the rural world and peasant
life” was established. Later, in the 1950s and sixties, we see in Portugal
a deep change in economic structures largely guided by the start of
electrification and modern industrialisation from the end of the forties
(Rosas, 1994: 53). From the Portuguese cultural perspective, a new fig-
uration of the intellectual arose: he/she should contribute to the aware-
ness of the working classes, and culture could not from then on be the
monopoly of an elite, but should belong to a collective, on the way
to a larger or total emancipation, aiming at a reaction to dictatorship
and capitalism, a self-defined “new humanism”33. As a consequence,
one may say that in general, neo-realist aesthetics, at least in its ini-
tial phase, appreciated the prevalence of content over form, although
the theoretical and not always consensual paradigm, defended the dia-
lectic new content/new form (Viçoso, 2011: 31); Redol’s reference to

33 See Viçoso, 2011, chapter I.

205
the “human documentary” in the title of the first edition of Gaibéus34
should be remembered. Mário Dionísio wrote about “deform” instead
of “photographing” (Dionísio, 1942), saying that art exists only when
it transfigures, alters, responds, reacts. Though this poetics is situated
far beyond the relationship of each author with his/her “matrix space”,
the “relationship with a specific telluric imaginary and the correspon-
dent symbolism” has been recognised, an affective and creative relation-
ship with the specific mythology that would define the writer’s identity
(Viçoso, 2011: 31). Manuel da Fonseca is one of these cases. The uto-
pian and libertarian dimension is present, side by side with a certain
nostalgia for a lost space. This stance is evident and assumed from the
beginning in the Prefaces, as happened in the volumes previously dis-
cussed. In the Preface to the ninth edition (1981) of O Fogo e as Cinzas
(1951), the author’s words emphasise the individual and interrogative
side of his short stories and also the implicit conjugation of time and
space. Landscape is included in the list of living things. He writes:

34 “This novel does not intend to stay in literature as a work of art. Above all it wants
to be a human documentary set in the Alentejo. After that, it will be what others
want it to be” (Redol,1939).
In an anonymous answer to a reader’s question in the periodical Globo (Year II, 32,
1 October 1944) about the definition of neo-Realism, this synthesis is very clearly
made: [2nd Neo-Realism strives to be the synthesis of both schools [Romanticism
and Realism]; on one side to embrace reality to describe it as it is, on the other
to dream of a different reality to turn to; 3rd Neo-Realism does not only seek to
describe reality but also to change it. Therefore, it brings out the heroism of the
struggle of those who are the means of its transformation. This heroism is not
the individualistic heroism of the isolated person, but the heroism of a group
whose greatest values are merely a clearer affirmation; 4th Neo-Realism does not
intend to be merely a synthesis of Romanticism and Realism, but of all schools,
because one of the characteristics of the new humanism is the recapturing of «all
the heritage that has come down to us […] 5th Neo-Realism does not perceive
the human being as disconnected from social life and therefore views him or her
from a different angle, but also desires the greatest development of the individual.
It makes use of all the fruitful discoveries of interiorism and rejects only what
seems simply the result of an imagination without control”. (Anonymous as cited
in Pinheiro Torres, 2002: 209)

206
 The people I write about are the ones who were present in my life. Family people
or people I knew. In them I began to discover myself myself being the lives I told
about. That is it, me. Even when I listened to the life of stranger, I immediately
discovered that that person was two or three individuals that I already knew, one
of whom, in time, began to be me. Telling others’ lives is to interrogate our own
life. Only time purifies. Fiction is built with the remains of the past. It re-lives it.
In the same way, landscape is a living being – it must be reinvented: only thus will
it be real, as in life.
[As pessoas de quem escrevo são as que houve na minha vida. Gente de família
ou conhecida. Nelas me fui descobrindo e sendo eu próprio as vidas que contei. É
isso, eu. Até quando escutava a vida de algum desconhecido, logo descobria que
esse desconhecido era dois ou três indivúduos que eu já conhecia um dos quais,
com o tempo, começava a ser eu. Contar a vida dos outros é interrogar a nossa
própria vida. Só o tempo depura. Ficção constrói-se com o que fica do passado.
Revive-o.
Do mesmo modo a paisagem é um ser vivo – tem de se reinventar: só assim será
real, como na vida.] (Fonseca, 2004: 9)

The 1984 Preface to Aldeia Nova (2005; 1942) reinforces this perspec-
tive and also brings the traditional image of evenings by the fireside.
Manuel da Fonseca reaffirms that narratives are centred in memories to
which little was added when he wrote them; narratives which can not
be classified as good or bad, and made him leave the reader with one or
various conclusions (Fonseca, 2005: 8). The reference to the evenings,
alluding to the oral tradition of the tale and to a storyteller full of moral
authority, who enchanted his audience and kept the family memories,
could well be included in a volume of the previous decade – the 70s or
80s of the nineteenth century35:
From early childhood I found myself by the fireside, silent and observant, in the
long Winter nights, or at the table, after dinner, in the long Summer evenings,
listening to my father, the great knowledgeable artist that he was, fluent and brief,
talking now passionately, now lulling, always evocative, sluggish in details and
sudden events, telling family histories.

35 Vítor Viçoso calls this “a nostalgic memory of childhood and an autobiographism

intrusive to a certain point, in the view of a certain neo-Realist codification, as if
in his work echoed, albeit occasionally, the distant murmur of the psychologism
of the Presença movement” (Viçoso, 2011: 122).

207
 [ Desde muito criança me surpreendi, calado e atento, à lareira, nas longas noites
de Inverno, ou à mesa, ao fim do jantar, nos demorados serões de Verão, ouvindo
o meu pai, o grande artista sabedor que ele era, fluente e breve, num falar ora
veemente ora embalador, sempre evocativo, moroso de pormenores e de súbitos
acontecimentos, contar histórias da família.] (Fonseca, 2005:7)

The author assumes his storyteller role and, though there is no intrusion
in the short stories of Aldeia Nova, in the volume À Lareira nos Fundos
da Casa onde o Retorta tem o Café (2000), the fireside is often evoked,
where in Winter, a group of friends drinks coffee-brandy, smoking cigars
and talking. These excerpts show that, at least in the short texts, the
transforming and liberating dimension referred in note 34, is not pres-
ent or, at least, is not active. Manuel da Fonseca remembers, imagines,
reveals and reveals himself, assuming the relationship between reality
and his own experience and imagination. At the same time, he gives
voice to a world he knows well. Landscape reflects routine, immobility,
claustrophobia, frustration and impossibility. The short stories “Cam-
paniça” and “Aldeia Nova”, included in the volume Aldeia Nova (1942)
show this. In the first, Valgato is described as a sad place, from which
the character Maria Campaniça dreams of fleeing. The description of
nature and landscape reinforces the immobility and the characters’ lack
of prospects, and above all their being condemned to a condition they
are unable to change:
Valgato is a bad land.
It lies at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by thick woods and scrawny cork trees.
The rest is yellow soil, bare as far as the eye can see. There are no tilled fields
around it. There is the endless heath spreading to the rest of the world. And, in the
middle of the wilderness, at the bottom of the valley, caught in solitude, lies the
village of Valgato, under a stagnant sky.
Valgato is a sad land.
[Valgato é terra ruim.
Fica no fundo de um cónego, cercada de carrascais e sobreiros descarnados. O
mais é terra amarela, nua até perder de vista. Não há searas em volta. Há a char-
neca sem fim, que se alarga para todo o resto do mundo. E, no meio do descam-
pado, no fundo do vale tolhido de solidão, fica a aldeia de Valgato debaixo de um
céu parado.
Valgato é uma terra triste.] (Fonseca, 2005: 15)

208
The paralysis of nature, the wilderness in which the village is sit-
uated and the stagnant sky that covers it, extends to the dull vision
of the people of Valgato, whose gaze is faded after years of looking
at the wilderness and enduring a routine of work without prospects –
the path that leads them without deviation or mistakes to the manor
houses. Manuel da Fonseca does not build a specific action, he rather
describes the life of the group of men and, in more detail, the dreams
of the female character, ‘painting’ a scene through the repetition of
certain images, such as for example, “the fear that the sun will never
come back” [“o medo que o sol nunca mais volte”]. Men, character-
ized as indecisive are compared to prisoners behind bars in a jail, who
found freedom in singing (Ibid: 17–18). The woman (Maria Cam-
paniça) dreams she has died without leaving Valgato, that “endless
plain” [“planura sem fim”] (Ibid: 18) in which the voices, like the
wind in the pinewood, reveal “weeping, grief, rage” [“choro, mágoa,
raiva”] (Ibid: 19). The landscape is oppressive in its solitude and arid-
ity, and these act on its dwellers, creating in them an enormous desire
for escape and dreaming. But of all the group that is described, only
one person, Zé Gaio, had left, never to return.
The same suffocating and hopeless life is portrayed in “Aldeia
Nova”. The short story describes the six years’ work of a thirteen-year-
old boy, who starts as a swine herdsman in a manor house. Zé Cardo
is described as a child without childhood, full of fears and wanting to
cry, thrown to the task of keeping swine among strangers. The deso-
late, fearful nights, “the sad, stagnant life like a condemnation” [“a vida
triste e parada como uma condenação”] (Ibid: 143) stimulate him to
create a dream around Aldeia Nova, a kind of paradise he hears about,
in the stories he likes so much to listen to from the day labourers, whose
bitterness and affliction he now understands better. The landscape is
depicted, as in the previous short story, through claustrophobic images,
whose effect is amplified by the boy’s immaturity: “with the shadows
spreading all over the wilderness, solitude spreads out” the “sameness
of flat horizons”; “the solitude of the ‘montado’36 land and the fears

36 Corktree forest.

209
of the night”; “the twisted corktrees, their open branches like outlaws
waiting”; the “dark, covered sky” [“com as sombras alastrando por todo
o descampado alastra a solidão”; a “monotonia de horizontes chatos”;
“a solidão do montado e os medos da noite”; “os sobreiros torcidos
com os ramos abertos [que] pareciam bandidos em espera”; o “céu
fechado e negro”] (Ibid:137–143). These are very far from the land-
scapes drawn before, and also from the relation established with the
characters; now, both mirror wandering, condemnation, opposition. The
representation of landscape and rural people by Manuel da Fonseca and
other neo-Realists contrasts and disputes many cultural creations of the
Estado Novo (and in general with its propaganda), such as the Marchas
Populares [Popular Parades], the contest of the “most Portuguese vil-
lage in Portugal”, the Portugal dos Pequenitos [The Little Ones’ Por-
tugal] or the school book texts. To some extent, the Estado Novo took
advantage of something that already existed: the idealised Romantic
ideology, the backwardness of the population, the distance between the
intellectual elite and rural people. The relationships between popular
and learned culture are complex. Both Romanticism as neo-Realism,
albeit with some differences, tended to the intersection between two
perspectives, and Alves Redol even idealises the inclination to dilution
between the two voices. In this period, the understanding and manipula-
tion of the cultural origins of the nation may lead to the consideration of
two distinct nationalisms: that of neo-Realism and that of Estado Novo
(Viçoso, 2011). The subject is full of ambivalences (as noted with regard
to regionalist literature) and continually in relation to social structures,
as referred from the beginning. In Portugal, the large cultural distance
between the rural population and the city elites, made the question more
complex. The representation of the rural space and landscape can reveal
many of the identity issues that criss-cross the subject. Multifocaliza-
tion, the relationship between the character or narrator’s senses and
their representation in the mental and physical landscape, the impact
of time on the representation of spaces and in the capturing of social
and cultural changes, all these reveal the socio-cultural processes con-
temporary to their authors. The study of landscape representation can
help to understand why in the Portuguese space the rural or regionalist

210
short story grew until quite late (Domingos Monteiro, João de Araújo
Correia, Urbano Tavares Rodrigues among others) and the modernist
short story, the form that truly emancipated this literary genre up to the
1930s, had practically no followers (except for Almada Negreiros). Just
as a comparative example it is worth noting that, in his study on region-
alist fiction in Great-Britain, K. Snell (1998:47) stresses that it is not
possible to interpret regional fiction without the study of the issues cre-
ated by national ideologies and programmes. However, in Great Britain,
from early on, the definition of regional narrative assumes a non-totali-
tarian stance. An ideology is connected to the space it describes, to the
vocabulary and codes it makes use of and embodies (Lefebvre, 1991).
Literature of the regions makes room for a dialogue not only with the
cultural and physical landscapes of each space but, evidently, a dialogue
with the space and time of each nation and with its multiple identities.

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